The Overnight

by Ramsey Campbell

  "I think I'd better stay if you don't mind, just in case."

  He hasn't finished speaking when she presents her back to him. "Time for everyone to go that's coming," she calls. "We don't want to rush in the fog."

  Two men whose scalps appear to have engulfed most of their hair glance up from their armchairs and the children's book each is holding open in his lap. They seem to wonder if Agnes is including them. "I'm driving everyone," she informs Woody.

  "Sounds like you are, sure enough."

  Greg smiles to indicate he understands the quip. As Agnes disappears into the lobby he returns to his shelving. Woody approaches the seated men to ascertain what kinds of books they like, but has elicited only "Don't know" and "No" by the time Agnes leads her troop through the shop. "We'll be back as soon as we can," Jill assures Woody while Agnes remains defiantly mute.

  Once Ross and the women nobody's allowed to call girls any longer have passed the window, Greg strains his ears to judge where Agnes is parked. He sees the same question has occurred to Woody, who darts out of the shop. Four car doors slam, muffled by the fog, and as he becomes part of the murk the vehicle outdistances him. A grey breath precedes him into the shop as though he's full of fog. "That wasn't in back," he announces, Greg assumes more to him than to Angus, to whom Woody then turns. "And you missed one."

  He snatches a handful of leaflets from the counter and hurries out once more. Greg takes himself to be left in charge and does his best to stay aware of his surroundings while he works. Is one of the seated men muttering, or are both of them making a surreptitious noise? As well as the thin wintry chatter of Vivaldi overhead Greg is convinced he hears an underlying motif, voices that keep collapsing into a single voice and then parting while they struggle to speak or chant or produce some other sound. He would ask the men to be quiet if there were any other customers, though Angus seems unaware of what they're doing and of a good deal else. He has abandoned the counter to tidy his shelves, and Greg is about to remind him that the tills always have to be manned during opening hours when the phone saves Angus. He sets out for the counter, but Greg is faster to the extension by Teenage. "Welcome to Texts at Fenny Meadows. Greg speaking. How—"

  "Is the boss about?"

  Greg doesn't know if it's ruder of the man to interrupt or to imply that Greg sounds nothing like a manager. "May I ask—"

  "It's his landlord."

  That does rather change the situation. "Angus, can you see Woody?" Greg calls.

  Angus sidles to the end of the window display and leans towards the glass, to be met by a grey swelling wider than his head—his breath. The seated men swivel their dull eyes as if they think Greg spoke to them, and Frank goes as far as peering out of the entrance. "No," Angus admits, echoed by the guard.

  "Do you think you might consider going a bit further, Frank?" When the guard takes him literally, if he even does that, Greg manages to contain his frustration. "He doesn't seem to be available at the moment," he tells the phone. "May I take a message?"

  "I'd just love to be able to find him in."

  "He should be here for hours once he gets back."

  "In the house he's meant to be renting from me."

  Greg hesitates for only a second; it's surely his duty to ask. "Is there some problem with payment?"

  "None of that. His bank's not let me down. I like to see my tenants are comfy, that's all."

  "Shall I ask him to ring you?"

  "That'd be a start."

  Presumably the landlord has no further comment to make before static that sounds like an uprush of water sweeps away his voice. When the static sinks into the dialling tone Greg reverts to shelving. He repatriates a pair of stray books—a guide to sketching, with a scribble on the cover for a face, a watercolour manual that falls open at daubs hardly more than graffiti—and tries to make up the time they cost. At least now he hears only the pinched twittering of violins, and he won't let Angus distract him by keeping a watch on the fog. Is he looking out for customers or Woody? The rest of the staff will have gone straight to the funeral. Greg falls to speculating which of them the shop could manage without: Connie and her brittle insistence on treating everything lightly, Nigel and his faint grin that seems to invite every situation to amuse him, Ray with his football emblems that have no place in the shop, Madeleine acting as if her section is the only one that matters … Greg has unloaded one side of the trolley by the time Woody reappears. "Was I long?" he says with a smile that hopes not.

  "I shouldn't think so," Angus says.

  Perhaps Woody senses as Greg does that Angus is too eager to please. "I guess more cars must have shown up since you were out."

  "That'll be it," Angus says quicker still.

  Greg waits until Woody turns his smile aside from Angus. "There was a call for you."

  "Nothing like feeling wanted, huh? What do I need to do?"

  Greg assumes he'd prefer Angus and the men not to hear about his business. "Should we talk privately?"

  "Do you think? Okay, sure." Woody's smile seems to urge them both towards the delivery lobby, and grows wider and fiercer as he has to slap the plaque on the wall twice with his badge. When the exit defers to him he mutters "It wasn't her again, was it?"

  "It wasn't a lady."

  "I wouldn't call her that any longer." He jabs a fist at the door to help it shut and faces Greg. "So who's after me?"

  "Your landlord."

  "Is that right?" For a moment his smile appears uncertain of its own meaning. "What did he say to you?"

  "Just that he's kept missing you at your house. He only wants to check you've got everything you'd like."

  "That isn't much. I believe I have, sure enough. I must have been here when he came visiting."

  Greg's aware that Woody works longer hours than anyone else at the shop. He's wondering if it would be presumptuous of him to say so when a question leaves his mouth instead. "Has someone come back?"

  There's movement in the stockroom; it sounds as if books are being fumbled off the shelves. "Somebody's upstairs," he hisses.

  "Think so? We'll soon see," Woody says and shoves past him to dash up the stairs. Greg is so thrown by his rudeness that he doesn't know whether to follow, and then he sees that if anyone has sneaked in, his job is to head off their escape. He sprints out of the lobby and past the children's section to the door up to the staffroom. He releases it with his badge and closes it even more softly before tiptoeing upstairs.

  Someone must have decided they owed more loyalty to the shop than to the funeral, because Greg can hear a shuffling of books. How did the person manage to return unobserved by him or Woody? By the time he gives up stealth and hurries into the stockroom nobody is to be seen, not even Woody. A rack jangles faintly and settles down, but Greg isn't about to imagine that anybody has squeezed into hiding behind the books. He's tiptoeing again while he strains to identify a noise, a repetitious mutter—a voice chanting somewhere ahead. It isn't in the empty staffroom, nor the office Ray and Nigel and Connie share. It's in Woody's room.

  As Greg crosses the shared office he ignores the sight of himself shrinking into the blank screens, a manikin multiplied by three and sucked down into murk. Woody's door is carelessly ajar, and he's sitting with his back to it. All four quarters of the security monitor appear to be occupied by the same image, a close-up of part of a face, unless the face is so large that just a fraction of its loose swollen-lipped grey-toothed grin fills the screen in fragments. It must be a reflection of the fluorescent tube overhead, because as soon as Greg steps into the office the image resolves into four views of the sales floor. One shows Angus gazing morosely across the shop at the seated men, and at last Greg hears what Woody's muttering. "Keep smiling," he repeats. "Keep smiling."

  "Shall I tell him when I go down?"

  "You bet," Woody says, and his smile twirls to face Greg as his chair swings round. "You're the man to remind him."

  "I couldn't find anyone in the stockroom."

  "Yo
u and me both. Just some books fell down."

  Very occasionally, such as now, Greg might feel Woody's smile is inappropriate. "Not shelved properly, you mean?" he feels he should emphasise.

  "Couldn't have been."

  "Do we know whose fault it was?"

  "Couldn't say."

  "So long as they weren't damaged."

  "You're my kind of guy, Greg. You make me feel I'm doing it the way it should be done. Don't worry, everything's going to be perfectly fine once we're all shut in for the night tomorrow."

  He sends his smile after Greg and then pivots to watch the monitor. Greg wishes he could think of more to say, but perhaps Woody meant to assure him that he has said enough. He feels as if he has been favoured with a hint of the pressure Woody's under, which is tantamount to a mute appeal for support. Woody doesn't need to ask aloud. As Greg heads back to his shelving and to remind Angus how to look, he needn't remember to keep smiling, because he already is. That comes from being clear in his own mind. He won't allow Agnes or anything else to muddy his motives, and he'll be keeping what he's learned about Woody to himself. He's here for Woody and the shop.

  Gavin

  As the earliest bus out of Manchester for Liverpool drags the last of its glow across Gavin, the night gathers on him like ice. There's no sign of civilisation around the bus shelter in the lay-by except a mile of road in three directions. The one he needs is the winding lane boxed in by hedges behind the shelter. He has tramped less than a hundred yards when the spiky twigs close around the illuminated refuge, and he's alone with the charcoal dusk before dawn.

  He's coming down from E, and the speed it must have been cut with hasn't quite worn off. It's lending him energy and toying with the possibility that his mind and everything around him are about to flicker into a different state. Nobody is hammering a lump of metal; that's the sound of his feet in the lane. He isn't hemmed in by tangles of grey ice, they're hedges creaking like it on either side of him. Is he really glimpsing a muted twinkle of frost on the road? The chittering mixed with a shrill clatter is a bird flying out of undergrowth. The stale cold breaths that keep finding his face aren't emerging from a mouth that's waiting to swallow the sun, they're winds impregnated with fog. It, more than his progress, is delaying the bloodshot dawn ahead, which is one reason why he knows he's approaching Fenny Meadows. He might tell someone if there was anyone he thought he could that the fog tastes different around the retail park, not just stagnant and faintly decaying but with an indefinable underlying flavour so sly as to be virtually imperceptible. In that case, how can he be sure it's there? All he knows is that it seems a fraction more apparent every day he comes to work and that it puts him in mind of an extra drug in a tab that's supposed to be pure. He doesn't even know which drug, if any that he has ever sampled. Perhaps it's mostly the stubborn fog that makes his exposed skin grow clammy and begin to crawl as he comes in sight of the entrance to the retail park.

  Someone has been walking a dog on the grass around the edge of Fenny Meadows, or several dogs. The prints must have frozen and melted and frozen again; they might as well be shapeless, despite conveying the impression that they're determined to take shape. Do they lead all the way around the outside of the retail park? He can't see why it should matter, except that as he crosses the hardened mud bristling with tufts of grass behind Frugo he realises the mistake he made. The marks he thought a pet or pets had left are the size of human footprints, if not nearly the shape, and the ones he took for the owner's are several times as large. They must have been made by some machinery while the shops were being built, and have become misshapen since. The undertaste of the fog seems to rise from his sore jaw to fasten something like electricity on his brain until he stops staring at the prints and heads past Frugo onto the car park.

  He knows his way across, however foggy it becomes. If the tarmac feels soft and not entirely stable underfoot, that's because hours of dancing under the jagged light at the club and his tramp along the lane haven't entirely worn off. He just has to dodge from one stand of trees to the next, four token plantations before he should be in sight of Texts. His lack of sleep must be catching up with him: the trees nearest Frugo look swollen, only very gradually losing weight as the fog that blurs them appears to drain into them rather than retreating. The trees beyond them start out even greyer and fatter, and their fleshy appearance seems to sink into the patch of grass. Gavin doesn't like that much, thought it's preferable to the sight of the third clump shuddering as if they're ridding themselves of a jellyish greyness that vanishes into the mud. They must be shifting in the wind that urges fog at him as he sprints towards the last excuse for a grove. A few dead leaves fly to meet him as well, a couple landing on his sleeve while the rest settle on the tarmac so stealthily he peers at them. They're clenched empty spiders, or is he hallucinating? To end up that size they would have been bigger than his hand when they were alive. The taste of the fog wavers through his head as he shakes off whatever's clinging to his sleeve. He hurries past the tree Mad's car cut down, but why is he hurrying? His watch shows that nobody is due at Texts for a quarter of an hour. Then a layer of fog peels away from the shopfront, letting him see through the bleary window a figure scurrying down an aisle and brandishing a weapon.

  Even when he identifies Woody, Gavin thinks he's chasing someone and about to club them unconscious or worse. It's only after Woody has wagged the object gleefully above his head as he parts two books with his free hand and inserts his burden into the space on the shelf that Gavin understands it's a book. By then Woody has caught sight of him. His smile is beyond magnification, but his eyes bulge with a greeting as he runs to open the door. "Hey, Gavin," he cries through the glass. "Thinking you could beat me?"

  "Beat you at what?"

  "Say again?"

  Now that the door is open the question doesn't seem worth repeating, but Woody smiles at him until he mutters "Beat you at what?"

  "At nothing. To the worm. Anyone behind you?"

  Once Gavin grasps that he's being asked if he has arrived by himself he says "Nobody I know of."

  All the same, Woody turns his smile on the fog for several breaths that resemble drifts of it before he shuts the door, which tolls like an underground bell. Gavin is beginning to wish he'd taken more time on the road but feels compelled to ask "Did you say something about a worm?"

  "The one the early bird gets. You have to eat a few worms if you're going to fly."

  Gavin is making for the staffroom in the hope he'll be leaving that idea behind when Woody says "Take a moment. You can be the first to see."

  Gavin swings around to be confronted by Woody's smile and his breath, which is continuing to mimic fog. "See what?"

  "Don't you notice any difference?"

  He's staring past Gavin, who has to turn his back on him. At the far end of the aisles the children's section looks almost imperceptibly drained of its colours and possibly not quite in focus, as though a trace of the fog he can still taste has reached it. He doesn't think this is what Woody is eager for him to notice—so eager that he senses Woody's expression like a hint of teeth resting on the nape of his neck. He squints harder at the children's books and at the aisles that lead to them. "It's all tidy."

  "Nearly all. I'll be through by the time we open. I wanted to show you guys how the store can look, how it needs to every morning from now on. If I can fix it by myself a bunch of you sure can."

  "How long did it take you?"

  "Twice as long as a pair of you, three times as long as a whatever you want to call it, what do you, doesn't matter, three. You do the math."

  Gavin doesn't care about the answer but will feel stupid if he doesn't make his point clear. "How much sleep have you had?"

  "Enough or I wouldn't be standing here, right? Once we're through tonight we'll all have a chance to sleep."

  Does he think Gavin needs to be told that? Gavin feels close to overdosing on Woody's intensity—he doesn't know if the man looks more like an evan
gelist or a clown. When Woody pounces on another book to relocate with smiling vehemence, Gavin heads for the staffroom. He's just here to do the job he's paid for and to have some fun if he can find it along the way.

  The plaque by the exit insists on being shown his badge twice. The delay gathers like a storm cloud in his head. Frustration or the last of the speed sends him up the stairs without treading on half of them. He shoves the staffroom door aside and snatches his card from the Out rack. He slides the card under the clock and drops it in In, and is considering awakening the percolator when he hears a flurry of activity. Footsteps are hurrying upstairs, though for a second he thinks their approach has blotted out another movement, softer and of no shape he can define. Was it in the stockroom? It has gone now, and he tells himself it couldn't have been there as the door by the clock admits Nigel and Mad. To his bewilderment, both the clock and his watch show they're on time, and Woody is following as if he has herded them upstairs. "No need to sit down," he says. "This won't take long."

  Nigel's mouth droops open as though having his shift meeting hijacked is no joke. "Here's how we do it starting now," says Woody. "Why doesn't everyone try to be the best at something to do with the store, your choice." His smile barely slackens while he adds "Come up with it while you're working. Gavin, you man the counter for an hour unless Madeleine wants to woman it."

  "He can have it," Mad says without humour. "I expect my section's needing me as usual."

  Gavin feels as if he has inadvertently antagonised her. He heads for the stairs as much to escape a sense of being trapped as to start work. He hasn't reached the bottom when Woody darts after him. "Okay, I'm not hounding you," Woody says.