The One Safe Place

by Ramsey Campbell

  Someone walked past the window, and Mevin ducked to peer at their legs. "Afternoon, Mr. Corcoran. Hope the nags were kind to you today," he muttered, then tilted his face toward Don. "You aren't telling me all these books are common as muck."

  "I wouldn't presume to do that, because most of the authors—well, they aren't names I'm overly familiar with."

  "Call yourself—" Mevin began, then slurped his tea instead. "The late missus had a lot of time for them," he said with a hint of menace, "and you'll find plenty like her in Manchester."

  "I believe you, but I don't know if I see them in my shop."

  "You want to advertise more, then. Get yourself a block in the yellow pages. I nearly didn't find you, you're in such piddling little type. You'd think you were ashamed of yourself." Another pair of legs strode by, and Mevin ducked lower. "Afternoon, Mrs. Devine. Got a ladder there. Here, puss, puss, puss," he called, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together, and stared at Don as though to convince him he'd seen nothing of the kind. "I've got to sort my laundry out for the daughter if you want more time."

  Don had been surveying the rest of the books while raising the mug to his lips and letting it drop. "If this is the lot I've seen it, thanks."

  Mevin drained his mug and spat some tea leaves into it. "So let's be hearing your offer."

  Don imagined the amount of space the books would occupy in his shop or in the trays outside it, and saw how much work the basement needed, not that he could justify too significant a contribution. Maybe the condition of the books would indeed help him sell them. "What would you say to two hundred, two hundred and fifty pounds?"

  "You wouldn't want to hear it, pal. Double it and double it again and add the number you first thought of and then slope off if that's the best you can do."

  "I assure you, Mr. Mevin, I'm trying to be generous."

  "Don't bloody strain yourself." Mevin went to the window and gazed up at the deserted street while bumping his mug along the lowest stretch of barbed wire; then he swung around in a crouch, leaving the wire jangling. "The daughter wants me to give the randy books the push before I move in with her in case the grandchildren get their grubbies on them, and the rest aren't my meat. Come close to a thousand and I'll shake hands with you."

  "I'd raise my offer if I could, but honestly—"

  "You're not a Jew as well as a Yank, are you?"

  Don wasn't, but he couldn't have felt more outraged. "If you're going to put it that way—"

  "Better learn how we do business over here, then. I'll be seeing what I get from someone who doesn't mind splashing their money around, in the yellow pages for a start." Mevin seized Don's mug, dunking his fingers in the tea. "Watch where you tread on your way out. I won't be paying your hospital bill."

  "Interesting to have met you," Don murmured as he stepped over the barbed wire and groped for the front-door latch, but couldn't prolong his sarcasm when he glanced back out of the sunlight and saw the stooped man watching him along the gloomy hall. "I hope you find someone more amenable," he said, and hurried to the Volvo, wondering what comments Mevin might be addressing to his legs.

  Bookselling brought worse encounters, he thought as he pulled on the seatbelt to hush its complaint, and better ones too. Only last week he'd found on a church stall a near fine first of a Conan Doyle novel. A regular client in Georgia had snapped that up before Don had had a chance to list it in his catalogue. Any good British finds were assured an American buyer, which was why Don had visited Britain several times, latterly accompanied by Susanne and Marshall, both of whom had grown so fond of it that when Susanne, having been observed by a visiting lecturer at Florida Atlantic, had been offered the opportunity to teach the same course in Manchester—

  The sound of high heels interrupted his musing as they halted by the car. A young woman, perhaps not so young once he saw through her makeup, leaned down to gaze at him across the passenger seat. "On business, love?"

  "No other word for it. At least I just was. You don't mind if I—" She wasn't wearing much of a skirt, Don noticed, and wondered belatedly if she might after all not be a resident questioning his right to park. He pressed the button to lower the window she was gazing through. "Sorry, what did you ask me?"

  He knew as soon as he spoke. She'd said not "On business" but "Want business." Her gaze was losing patience. "Oh, right, got you, yes, no, thanks anyway," Don gabbled, almost knocking his glasses to the floor as he shoved them higher on his nose. "Excuse me," he saw himself repeating in the mirror as he twisted the key twice in the ignition before the Volvo deigned to start. He pulled out without checking for traffic, and for a moment couldn't think whether he was driving on the correct side of the road.

  He was, but away from home. Retracing his route past the woman didn't appeal to him, and so he turned right when he could, only to find that the next street which should lead to the park was sentineled by two No Entry signs with terse words added to the horizontal white space on each red disc. He made for the nearest main road, where the three-story houses were split into pairs by gaps not much wider than a man, and a small green bus was chugging from side street to side street as though searching for a bus stop. Brightness was hopping up and down a group of traffic lights half a mile onward, and the route sign which preceded them indicated that he should drive straight on, contrary to his instincts.

  The road forked, and he took the rightward curve to be his route. It led to another gathering of traffic lights, before which a black Peugeot was parked on double yellow lines, an orange sticker in its window signifying that the driver was disabled. "Must be some zippy cripple," Don mused, not the kind of comment he would have made if there had been anyone to hear, and hoped that the driver couldn't read lips. Don glanced at him in passing and received such a hostile red-eyed glare that he didn't even consider asking for directions. The lights ahead turned amber, and he trod on the brake. As he did so the driver of the Peugeot jerked a phone away from his face and swung the car out from the curb.

  He obviously expected Don to drive through the amber so that he could follow through the red. Don saw the black car rush toward him in the mirror, and pressed his shoulders and the back of his head against the seat-rest and snatched his foot off the brake pedal. His head filled with a stench of burning rubber that seemed to epitomise his panic. Then the Peugeot veered around him, so close he felt the Volvo shake, and slammed to a halt in front of him.

  He tramped on the brake again, barely in time. The stench had become a sour taste in his mouth. "You nematode," he called the other driver, which helped his lips not to shake. "You pedicule. You fumarole, you—" He was trawling his mind for further insults when he met the glare of the red eyes in the Peugeot's rear-view mirror.

  They were accusing him of having caused the incident, and that was more than he could take. He grabbed the magnifying glass and pretended to scan the registration number of the Peugeot, mouthing it, though in fact the two cars were so close together he couldn't see the plate. He laid the glass beside the book and saw the red eyes bulging with rage in the mirror. The man's shoulders writhed, and his upper body lurched toward the gearshift, though the traffic lights were still against him.

  He was going to back his car into the Volvo, Don realised in disbelief. He clutched his own gearshift in order to reverse, just as a green bus bumbled out of the last side street he'd passed and blocked the road behind him. Then a long white police car bearing a tubular crest of unlit lights arrived at the intersection from the right and indicated a right turn. The traffic lights ahead of the Peugeot began to reach for green, and the car roared away along the left-hand road.

  Don braked in case the police went after the Peugeot, but the police driver frowned at him. The bus emitted a sound more like a burp than a honk, and Don sent the Volvo across the intersection, almost stalling in his haste. The lights were already changing behind him, and as the bus cruised after him the police car swerved to overtake both it and him.

  As its crest brightened he
was sure it was about to howl and force him to stop. It sped away, its tube unlit after all, and he saw that only a wedge of sunlight between houses had caused it to appear to be switched on. "Not guilty," he told himself, with a wry grin at needing to be told, and followed the police car around a prolonged curve of the road. Suddenly its crest and its other lights blazed, and it raced into another main road, halting traffic bound for the centre of Manchester.

  That was the Wilmslow Road, the half a mile of it which was occupied by Indian restaurants and sweetshops and grocery stores, and Don was almost home. Unlike the police, he waited for the traffic lights to give him the signal. Two cars crossed in front of him after they should have, and the red facing him was just sharing its glow with the amber when he saw a black Peugeot approaching far too fast behind him.

  Surely it wasn't the same car—surely the driver couldn't have hung back until the police were out of sight. Nevertheless Don took off at speed across the intersection before glancing in the mirror. He saw the Peugeot swing around a turning car with barely inches to spare and rush after him. The sight almost blinded him to the ambulance which was backing out of a hospital entrance ahead of him.

  He hadn't time to think or waver. He trod hard on the accelerator pedal, sending the Volvo past the rear of the ambulance, which kept coming. In the mirror he saw it reverse into the path of the Peugeot, and braced himself for the sound of the crash as he steered the Volvo into the nearest side street. But there was no crash. Instead he saw the Peugeot skid around the ambulance, straighten up with a screech of its smoking tires and roar after him.

  At that moment all he knew was that he mustn't let himself be followed home. He drove past the turn he would have taken, and the next, and saw the Peugeot hurtle into the road behind him. He was already becoming lost in the maze of balconied three-story houses where quite a few of the streets turned corners only to lead to dead ends. He almost lost control of the car as he swerved into the next side turning—left or right, the meaning of the words had been crowded out of his head. He would have cornered again immediately, except that a cyclist with a wicker basket full of groceries on her handlebars was pedalling leisurely across the junction. She raised her greying eyebrows at him as he put on speed and swung into the middle of the road in his hurry to hide in the next side street, where an old man stripped to the waist was craning with a stick over the wrought-iron railings of his balcony in an attempt to dislodge something from the branches of a sycamore which sprouted from the corner of the sidewalk. There was no Peugeot in the rear-view mirror as he drove as fast as he dared to the corner—no sign of the Peugeot as he braked hard at the sight of a dead end less than a hundred yards ahead.

  He needn't feel boxed in by the three-story houses so long as he'd lost his pursuer. He edged the Volvo forward past a parked Daimler so as to have room to turn around. He was easing his car across the middle of the narrow roadway when the Peugeot skidded around the corner and screeched sideways to a halt, blocking the road.

  Don was aware of gripping the wheel and poising his foot on the accelerator pedal and awaiting his opponent's next move and feeling so absurd it almost paralysed him. Did he really propose to try to drive through whatever gap the Peugeot would leave as it came for him? Didn't only stuntmen attempt that kind of trick, even in movies? Then the fumes spurting from the exhaust pipe of the Peugeot faltered, gave a last black belch and died. The driver had switched the engine off.

  They were in another kind of movie now, Don thought, the kind where whoever outstared the other at the showdown won. "Do your worst, Red-eye," he murmured, keeping his lips nearly still—and saw the driver fling open the door and climb out of the car.

  "You're not disabled," Don said. He felt outraged and yet guilty, as though he'd brought the situation on himself by his earlier sly comment. The man stalked toward the Volvo, scratching his cheeks with nails as blackened as his stubbled chin, dragging at his face to expose more of the veins of his eyes and wrenching his mouth down. He let go of his face, having rendered it sufficiently hideous, as he reached the Volvo and commenced pounding on the roof.

  Don stared at the flattened silver skull of the man's belt buckle, at the way his clogged navel winked beneath the ragged hem of his Adidas T-shirt, and waited for the pounding to subside. When he heard the roof begin to give, however, he lowered his window a couple of inches. "Are you likely to get tired of that pretty soon, do you think?"

  Eight thick fingers clamped themselves in the gap, and the man's face descended into view. It looked to be suspended from its brush of dyed black hair that was shaved more or less clean below the tops of the ears, the weight of the cheeks having settled around the weak chin, pulling down the lower eyelids, which appeared to be collecting moisture like some kind of pinkish vegetation. The window turned grey with breath like an embodiment of the sluggishly menacing voice. "What you fucking say?"

  "I said, would you mind removing your hands and yourself from my car?"

  The face jerked closer—close enough to show Don a greenish denizen of the left nostril emerging and withdrawing with each breath, like a snail from a shell. "What you talking in that fucking voice for?"

  "I rather fear it's the only one I have. Now if you could—"

  "Supposed to make you sound like a hard man, is it? Come out and I'll show you how fucking hard you are."

  "I believe I'll take a rain check. I don't like repeating myself, but I really would ask you to—"

  The face was almost against the window now, and Don heard the glass creak as the fingers hauled at it. "What you mean taking people's fucking numbers?"

  Don was tempted to admit he hadn't, except for feeling that the revelation might lose him some advantage he wasn't even aware of. "What would I mean by it, do you think? If you damage that window—"

  "Give it here."

  "Not an option, I'm afraid. Now will you please—"

  "Give it fucking here."

  As much as anything it was the ponderousness of the interruptions which made Don feel trapped, hence increasingly angry and reckless. "I don't suppose it ever occurs to you that you may have a problem with monotonousness of language? This has been fun of a kind, but now if you'll excuse me—"

  He'd had enough. He was already late for picking up his family, and now he had to find his way home. A touch of the button would run the glass up against the man's fingers, and when he snatched them out Don would drive away. Then, perhaps having read Don's intention in his eyes, the man shoved himself away from the Volvo so forcefully that Don saw the glass bend inward. "Thank y—" he said, but this time it wasn't the voice that interrupted him. The man had pushed his leather jacket back and snatched an object out of the waistband of his jeans to point at him.

  It wasn't a gun, Don tried to think, at least not a real one, not one that was loaded, not here in Britain. But the man's eyes had become as indifferent as the metal hole lined up with Don's face, and with a lurch of awareness which made his head and stomach feel like gaping wounds, Don knew the threat was no pretense. He saw the man slide back the top of the weapon to expose the muzzle and place a bullet in the chamber. "Get your arse out here," the man said, "or I'll blow your fucking head off."

  Don's legs were trembling. If he slammed the car into first gear to drive past or even at the man, he was bound to stall the engine. If he didn't try to escape, if he got out of the car—Everything around the black hole of the muzzle appeared to be growing darker and heavier and motionless, paralysing his ability to think. Then there was movement, though for a dismayingly protracted few seconds he was unable to grasp what it was. The man who had been poking at the sycamore from his balcony had appeared beyond the Peugeot, frowning at it, and now he saw the gun.

  Don's hands clenched and unclenched on the wheel. He was struggling not to point out to the gunman that he was being watched, because what might he do to the witness? Yet if he thought he was unobserved—The man with the stick hesitated and fled, almost quietly enough. A single rap of his stick
on the sidewalk swung the gunman around just in time to see him.

  He aimed the gun with both hands, and the whole of Don's chest seemed to fill with an agonisingly held breath. In a moment the witness was out of sight, but before Don could exhale, the gun was pointing at his forehead. He saw the hands tense on the weapon, and the man narrowing his eyes to focus on the target, and the street appeared to brighten as though to give Don a last look at the world. Then he heard the slam of a front door, and the man jabbed the gun into his belt and lurched toward him. "Don't even fucking dream of giving anyone my fucking number."

  He was at the Peugeot in three loping strides. In what seemed to Don to be no time at all the black car bumped one front wheel over the sidewalk and was replaced by a cloud of fumes of its color. Don leaned his forehead against the windshield and closed his eyes. The glass, and the wheel in his fists, and indeed the entire car felt softened and quaking. He swallowed a few times, having remembered to breathe, and fumbled for the button to lower the window before concluding that he was probably not about to be sick. He panted for a while, then raised his head and his wrist to consult his Mexican Rolex. "Got to go," he said indistinctly. "Late."

  He groped for the ignition key until he noticed that the engine was still running, and eased the Volvo gingerly around to aim it back the way he'd driven into the trap. He cruised to the bend in the street at no more than ten miles an hour, trying to decide whether to turn left or right at the end. He'd just come in sight of the sycamore when a police car crowned by flashing lights blocked the junction ahead.

  "Too late, guys. Could have used you a few minutes ago," Don said, lifting his hands anyway in an appreciative gesture, and was dismayed to see how much they shook. Then all four doors of the police car sprang open and stayed that way, each releasing a policeman. The driver had a megaphone, which he aimed at Don. "Keep your hands where we can see them," it boomed, "and get slowly out of the car."