The One Safe Place

by Ramsey Campbell

"They're how the criminal looked to the victim," protested another geneticist, Sarah Klein.

  "So they mightn't look like that if you met them on the street," Wilf said, poking a copy of Casablanca back on the shelf.

  "Which rather defeats the object of helping the public spot the bad guy," said a geneticist whose name Susanne's last glass of claret seemed to have washed out of her head.

  "Maybe they're meant to tell us bad guys never look like us," Don suggested.

  "To make them conform to generic expectations of the bad guy," Susanne said.

  "I'll tell you what I think as well," Jack said, draining his glass and holding it up as though that would invoke a bottle. "I think those pictures are a means of undermining the self-image of the subject."

  "So's the way the judge describes them and whatever they're supposed to have done," Barbara said, "along with being a kind of hype aimed at the rest of us. The most wicked criminal, the worst crime ever tried in this court, half the time they seem to be."

  "I'm not sure what you're saying is wrong with shaking up their self-image," Susanne said.

  Jack transferred his attention from the empty glass to her. "Take away someone's image of himself and maybe you leave him with nothing."

  "Maybe that's all he deserves."

  "Does anyone?"

  "Gee," Don said, "and there were Susanne and Marshall and I thinking we were the victims. Can we offer anyone besides the thirsty gene another drink?"

  "Whenever you're ready to come down from the height. No, you're saved, here comes Marshall. Just an observation," Susanne said lower. "I might forgive the guy for breaking into our house, but not for terrorising our child and destroying something of his."

  She hadn't spoken low enough. "Mom," Marshall protested as he bore the wine into the room, "I don't care about the nuking flower."

  She saw that he felt his image was under attack, but before she could speak, Barbara did. "What's your version, Marshall? Did this Fancy man look as bad as his picture in the paper?"

  "A name like that," Jack said, half-draining his refilled glass for Marshall to top up, "is a good start for not thinking much of himself."

  "Marshall?"

  "He looked pretty bad. Like he was on something, maybe a few things."

  "Well, quite," Barbara said, and there was a general murmur of agreement which suggested that everyone took his response to confirm what they'd variously said.

  "There's just one point I'd like to make about the picture in the paper," Susanne announced.

  "Please," Jack said.

  "It worked. It caught him."

  "There's that," Jack admitted, and the others supplied varieties of murmur. When there was silence Marshall said, "Mom, the head of your department was asking where you were."

  "Did you say?"

  "He said he'd wait till you could have a talk. Shall I bring drinks?"

  "I'll preserve my sobriety in honour of the occasion."

  "Kind of late to do that," Don said.

  True enough, Susanne found the banister companionable as she descended the stairs. If Clement Daily wanted a private word she could take him up to the study next to the library, perhaps walking off a little of her condition en route. But he was all by himself in the front room, putting compact discs in some new order on the shelves. As Susanne closed the door behind her he straightened up so fast that his rotund form reminded her of an inflated toy bobbing up from underwater. "One thought one would, yes, while one was waiting," he said, producing his pipe from his waistcoat. "Settled in to all appearances, it would seem, hm? Very, yes, really quite impressive."

  Susanne gathered from the way he waved the pipe stem that he was referring to the house. She moved his glass of claret from the top of the television to the mantelpiece while he produced a box of matches from another pocket of his waistcoat and carefully extracted a match, which he considered for a pause before replacing it in the box. The story went that nobody had ever seen him smoke the pipe. "Go ahead," Susanne told him, out of frustration almost as much as hospitality. "No prohibitions here, well, within reason."

  "Reason, quite. Always worth bearing in mind." Clement gazed at the matchbox, then thumbed it back into its nest and glanced distractedly about in search of his glass. "Settled, however, we were saying. Problems at all? Any that you, yes, you'll recall my telling you when first we spoke, I'm always here."

  Even he wasn't usually this staccato. Susanne placed his glass in his hand in case that helped. "We feel as if we've lived here for years," she said.

  "My own, entirely, when we moved up from East Anglia. So your criminous encounter hasn't gone any way toward souring you."

  "It could have happened anywhere. We certainly aren't blaming here." Susanne was beginning to wish she had let Marshall refill her glass. "Why, do you think we should?"

  "If you're so settled I certainly, no. And please don't harbour the impression that I'm in any way, we regard you as an asset to the faculty."

  Susanne wasn't sure what he had just contradicted. "I believe you were looking for me."

  "Well, yes, or someone very like, if that can ever be said of anyone."

  "No, I mean just now. You told Marshall."

  "That would be your young, of course. Well, yes, a word." Clement replaced his glass on the television as though that was the only place he would be able to locate it again, and brought the matchbox out with a rattle that suggested he was expecting to find it had somehow emptied itself. "Your, yes, your course."

  "Yes?"

  "Yes." He stored the matchbox once again and called off the pipe's search for his mouth. "Yes," he said more contemplatively than ever, and Susanne was resisting a compulsion to repeat the word when he said, "Violence in all its forms."

  "In which it's portrayed."

  "Represented. Representation, yes, one appreciates that's the, yes. Only, now, the, forgive me, question one found it hard to, you understand, was why violence."

  "Who was asking?"

  "Initially, you mean to, yes." He touched one of his incisors with the pipe stem, and Susanne had the unsettling notion that he was about to play his teeth like a xylophone. "One gathers the Vice-Chancellor rather had mama rumbling in his office."

  "Who, sorry?" Susanne's speech seemed increasingly to be acquiring characteristics of his. "Whose?"

  "Of a student of yours. Elaine, would it be? Mrs., ah, who threatened you on television, I'm led to, you have it?"

  "Nash."

  Clement parted his lips as though Susanne had just told him what to do with his teeth. "Concerned about her daughter being exposed to, you'll have gathered as much."

  "Her grown-up daughter."

  "Age of majority, well, there is that. Not what it was or should be, mama maintains, but that's hardly for us to, appreciated, as I understand the veecee pointed out to her. A view received with a notable lack of enthusiasm, as we might have, yes. Appears to have stung her into vowing to take her complaint further."

  "In which direction?"

  "Ha," Clement said, not so much a laugh as a description of one he'd heard someone else emit. "To the media was apparently the threat. An idea we may presume she got from, well."

  "Do we need to be worried?"

  "Well, funding, you understand. Always potentially contentious, and in these frugal times, dear me. Should we really be spending money on and so forth. It might be wise to provide the powers that be with answers they can issue as appropriate."

  "About my course."

  "Why violence, as I think I, yes."

  "Because we're surrounded by it and representations of it. Because people consume it even if they think they don't, and it's our job as educators to equip people to analyse."

  "As I recall you told us when you originally, yes. Now, the agreement rather was that a written statement from you would be ideal."

  "I don't remember that."

  "No, one agreed today with the veecee that it would be useful for issuing if necessary to the media."
/>   "I can do that."

  "Capital. We'd expect no less of you. Whenever's convenient within the next few, yes? By Monday would be first rate."

  Susanne had the impression that he'd managed to get out of first gear at last and was coming at her faster than she liked. "It's so the University can back me up," she said.

  She was seeking confirmation, but perhaps her words didn't sound sufficiently questioning, because he took them for agreement. "Splendid," he said, and dug out the matchbox with a vigour which suggested he was about to celebrate. "Shall we join your other," he said, clamping the pipe stem between his teeth so as to reach for the doorknob.

  Susanne had been peripherally aware of some mumbling in the hall. It must have been closer than she'd had a chance to realise, because as Clement opened the door a man fell backward into the room. He recovered himself, but only to receive another push in the chest from Teresa Handley, the crime novelist. "Made sure I won't be invited again, didn't you?" she was saying. "I thought it was only lasses and bum bandits who powdered their noses."

  "Let's just remember it was your publisher who gave- —"

  "Someone else's fault, is it, like always? Leave me a note if you ever decide to grow up." She gazed at him with a resignation that seemed almost affectionate, then shoved him harder. "I told him I wanted none of it and I told you not to. And what's the tale of you and the profs big lass?"

  "The subject happened to come up and she asked me if I had—"

  "Her fault and all, was it? There's a shock. I hope you realise when her father hears about it that'll queer me with his whole department."

  "Tess, the only way he'll know is if you carry on—"

  "Oh, it's my fault! I shouldn't have needed telling, should I? Where do you reckon you're going?"

  Each time she gave him a push she stepped back into the doorway. Now he tried to dodge around her as she offered another, and Clement, murmuring, "Do excuse me if you," lurched at the gap on the other side of her. Clement faltered, waving pipe and matchbox with a rattle loud enough to have been emitted by both. "Forgive me, madam, but I think you ought to realise I'm, dear me."

  "Not you, you silly old whatever you're supposed to be. I'm talking to the bane of my existence. You scuttle off." She moved out of the doorway to let Clement sidle around her, and her husband made to follow. "Not you!" she roared.

  Clement stopped as though she'd collared him, and her husband bumped into him from behind. Don and Marshall and the professors of law and genetics were descending, and came to a halt on seven stairs to watch. Susanne thought it was time to intervene, but before she could Clement swung round, raising his pipe by the stem like a miniature cudgel, a gesture which flung tobacco over his shoulder as though for luck, and squeezing the matchbox in his other fist with a sound of muffled splintering. "I warn you," he said.

  "Don't be daft. How old are you? You'd think you were still in the playground," Teresa Handley told him, hauling her spouse away from him. "Just say if you want shut of us and we'll be gone."

  This was to Susanne. Presumably the alternative was to leave the couple alone in the room. She was glancing at Don for his opinion when the phone rang in the hall. Clement shoved the crushed matchbox into his pocket and let the bowl of the pipe fall into his other hand. "Shall I, yes?"

  "Go ahead," Susanne told him, not least to allow him to save face.

  He unhooked the receiver and transferred it to his cheek. "Yes, or rather, Travis residence."

  He frowned and seemed about to wave his pipe for silence as the group on the stairs recommenced descending. "I beg your, ah," he said, and his forehead relaxed. "I believe it's for young, yes."

  He held out the receiver at arm's length, stretching the coils of the cord taut, as Marshall ran down, having handed Don the bottles. It looked to Susanne as though the receiver would spring out of reach if Marshall didn't catch hold of it in time, but he did. "Hi, it's Marshall. Who's—"

  He snatched the receiver away from his face, and Don clutched the bottles to himself. Teresa Handley and her husband backed into the room, and Susanne almost snapped the stem of the wineglass she'd picked up from on top of the television. What came out of the receiver with such force that she could hear the earpiece vibrating was a child's shriek

  She couldn't tell whether it expressed rage or panic or despair. There were words in it, presumably directed at Marshall, but its loudness rendered them incomprehensible. It lasted only a few seconds, which was far more than enough. Then there was a click like the sound of a gun with no bullets, and the receiver began its empty drone, and it and Marshall were isolated by a silence which nobody appeared to want to break.

  5 Customers

  By lunchtime on Saturday Don felt as hungry as Marshall already professed himself to be. They were in Don's shop beneath the Corn Exchange building in the centre of Manchester. When Don had taken over the lease from a defunct supplier of military uniforms the basement had smelled of dust and mushrooms, but now it smelled as though he'd imported the exact same odour of old books that had characterised his shop in West Palm Beach. Sometimes that vegetable odour made him feel starved, and now it did. "About time for a pizza, I think you'll agree," he said.

  Marshall was perched on the other stool behind the counter, reading a book which Stephen King had been unable to put down. He adopted the crouch which Don knew meant he was going to read at least to the end of a paragraph and probably of a chapter. Don listened to the chimes of the cathedral across the road and the hollow blare of a train in the station beyond the cathedral, and watched the flickering of sunlight shuttered by passing traffic, an effect which made the books nearest the doorway appear to tremble with eagerness to be read. Books occupied the entire height of the interior walls and both sides of three parallel bookcases almost as wide as the shop, but Marshall had found his latest reading in the tray of paperbacks which loitered on the sidewalk. He raced to the end of the chapter and smoothed out a corner which a previous reader had turned down, and inserted a dinosaur bubble-gum card between the pages. "Hut?" he said.

  "That's what I figured. Get a small one between us. Remember where Pizza Hut is?"

  "Come on, dad, why wouldn't I? Between McDonald's and Burger King."

  "See how they're bending over backward to make us feel at home," Don said, only to wish he hadn't when the sole present customer, a man who was leaning backward and raising his spectacles on their cord so as to scan a top shelf, pursed his whitish lips. "How much do you need? Here's two, here's another two. Four quids should cover it."

  The customer lowered his head and let the spectacles slide down as far as his enlarged purple nose would allow. "Quid, to be precise, unless you mean tobacco. I don't think the language has been quite so radically revised yet, even slang."

  "Just being facetious. Marshall knew that, didn't you, son?"

  "Believe it. Don't sell my book, okay?"

  "What class of material are the young reading these days? I suppose we should be grateful that they read," the bespectacled customer said, and approached the counter to peer at the cover. "On reflection, perhaps not. What is this kind of thing for?"

  "Fun?" Marshall suggested.

  "Isn't there enough unpleasantness abroad without imagining this kind of pah?" The customer flipped the book onto its face as though to hide its naked skull and scanned the blurb. "A nightmare from which you'll be afraid to wake. Why on earth give yourself that, child?"

  "I don't get nightmares from reading books."

  "From where, then?" said the customer with a sharp look over his spectacles at Don.

  "Do you want me to go for the pizza, dad?"

  "Follow your stomach."

  Marshall pocketed the coins and ran up the stone steps, and Don hoped the boy had no reason to brood over the customer's last question. Since leaving the neighbourhood bullies behind in West Palm Beach he'd been sleeping more soundly, and even the child's voice on the phone at the party hadn't disturbed Marshall as much as it had affected his pa
rents. Maybe the call hadn't been meant for him—Clement Daily had assumed it was only because of the age of the caller, and hadn't been able to distinguish a single word. The police had advised the Travises to contact them if there was another such call, but why should there be? He felt as though the customer's gaze, bespectacled now, was accusing him of having somehow caused it, except that the man was chastising Marshall's book with a stubby forefinger. "I trust you keep an eye on the ideas your son puts in his head."

  "Do my best," Don said, raising his own spectacles and wondering what fool had once declared the customer was always right. "Were you looking for anything special?"

  "May I assume we're speaking man to man?" the other said, wetting his lips with his shocking pink tongue, then pirouetted toward the nearest shelf as three people came down the steps.

  He thought they were together until he saw one of them was the mailman. Nor did the two men in suits appear to know each other, because they started browsing on opposite sides of the room. The mailman planted on the counter the pile of Jiffy bags and cartons which had hidden his face, and mopped his forehead before trotting streetward. The first customer had been protruding each of his lips in turn as though he found the shop too crowded, and now he hurried to the steps before hoisting his spectacles to gaze through them across the shop at Don. "Don't think me interfering," he said, "but I really believe that giving your son access to such material is a form of child abuse."

  "Interfering? How could anyone possibly—" By now Don was addressing either the deserted steps or the remaining browsers, each of whom emitted a reticent cough and shifted his position very slightly. Don quieted himself and turned to the mail.

  Here was And But, the autobiography of a local poet whose poetry read like the work of a writer too lazy to organise it into prose and whose prose identified itself as the work of a poet by not beginning any sentence with a capital letter and only very intermittently putting dialogue in quotes. Perhaps he was so much in demand as a reader of his own work in pubs because he made his audience feel capable of reaching his standard if not surpassing it, Don thought, and inserted the customer's order slip between the pages to be phoned about later. Here was a wants list from a dealer in a Scottish village which appeared to be called by a choice of names, Dairsie or Osnaburgh. Blind Stomachs, The Still Small Loaves, The Rotters of Rotterdam, Eating Earwigs, The Priest Beneath the Bridge, The Slow Teeth, Ten Little Niggers not Indians... "Not Ten Vertically Challenged Members of an Ethnic Minority," Don muttered to himself, pushing the list away for later scrutiny, and was unpicking the staples of a Jiffy bag when he smelled the pizza approaching.