The One Safe Place

by Ramsey Campbell

  "He's twelve, isn't he, Mrs. Travis? Boys do change around that age."

  "I know that. We all do. It doesn't mean—" If she let them they could make her feel she had been wilfully unobservant, neglectful, no kind of a parent now that Marshall had only one. "This is crazy," she said. "Why are we even discussing—I'll show you he isn't trying to go back home. He never would without me."

  It took her well under a minute to run up to the study and switch on the light and pull out the desk drawer, but that was long enough for her to become unsure what she wanted to find. Just supposing Marshall's passport wasn't there, wouldn't that make him easy to locate when he tried to use it? She turned over the the topmost of the face-down passports, and it fell open at Don's photograph, looking as though being photographed had come as a shock to him. They'd laughed at that every time they'd used the documents, but now her innards tightened, because he looked helplessly shocked by what he saw coming. She shut the passport hastily and grabbed Marshall's from beneath hers. Now her dash seemed pointless, an illusion of activity; worse, it had shown her how much she would have liked to be proved wrong. She ran down even faster to display the evidence. "Here he is. I mean, this is his," she said, furious with losing her grip on language. "He can't have gone far without this."

  Askew leafed through the passport with, she thought, unnecessary thoroughness before laying it on the table. He'd already raised his eyes to her. "May I ask if you're a single parent family?"

  Other than "media" used as a singular noun, few abuses of language annoyed her more—a person couldn't be a family, yet she'd lost count of the number of people she'd heard making that claim—but this was no occasion for discussing niceties of usage. "My husband's dead," she told him, the words raw in her mouth.

  "Would that have been recently, Mrs. Travis?"

  "Three months ago. You'd have heard about it," she said, which meant she had to go on. "He was kicked to death outside his bookshop downtown."

  "I do recall the case. Wasn't there a gun involved?"

  "My husband thought we needed some defence, and what happened shows we did." She wasn't sure how appropriate her flaring anger was; it would hardly help Marshall, and she was about to drop the subject when Askew said, "How did your son feel about it?"

  "Bad. How on earth do you imagine he would feel?"

  "Do you think that may have any bearing on his absence?"

  Susanne had a sudden image, as fleeting and yet lingering as the glare of a flashbulb, of Marshall discovering where the Fancy family lived and going there to extract some revenge for Don's death. "What kind of—what?"

  "Has your husband a grave near enough for him to visit?"

  "Well—yes." For a moment Susanne was astonished that she'd been so involved in her situation that she had been unable to see that possibility; then her emotions slumped. "He wouldn't be there now. They lock the gates at dusk."

  "Where else can you think of he might be?"

  "I called all his friends before I called you. He's made plenty of friends, but none of them knew where he is."

  "You don't think it's possible any of them were protecting him."

  "From what? From me, his mother?"

  "I'm just suggesting, Mrs. Travis, that he may be afraid to face you since he, as you say, went AWOL"

  "Not seven hours' worth of afraid, no. Not so afraid he wouldn't realise I'd be as worried as I am. Even if he didn't want to face me he'd have left a message on the machine." A bunch of aches made her aware that she was gripping her fist with her other hand. "You have to take my word for it. I know there's more to this," she forced herself to say. "Otherwise he would at least have called by now."

  "I'm sorry if we seem unduly thorough. Limited resources, you may have heard." Askew's hand moved in the direction of his notebook, but only as far as his knee. "Can you think of any film your son would have seen that might have suggested a course of action to him?"

  "Such as what? He reads more books than he sees movies," Susanne said, trying to fight down her anger. How much did the policemen already know or think they knew about her? "He doesn't imitate anything he reads or watches."

  "As long as you're sure of that, Mrs. Travis."

  It wasn't Askew's scepticism which infuriated her so much as the slyness of it—his assumption that she couldn't be certain it was there. "If you want to discuss movies with me you'll have to enroll in my class," she said, but that was all the lightness she could summon up. "Maybe I should make this one point clear. You confiscated all our videos, the police did, but you won't be prosecuting. Someone someplace must have seen some sense."

  "If you say so, Mrs. Travis."

  "Listen," Susanne said, and steadied her lips with a finger. "If either of you feels my son and I deserve what's been happening to us these last few months, if you feel we brought it on ourselves somehow, don't be afraid to share your thoughts with me. Let's at least respect each other."

  Angel cleared his throat with two high sharp curt sounds. "Maybe if your husband—"

  "We aren't here to express that kind of opinion, Mrs. Travis. I hope you don't think it would affect our handling of your problem."

  "I hope I won't have reason to. Maybe if my husband what?"

  "Mrs. Travis, we can argue," Askew said, "or we can do our best to find out what's happened to your son."

  "Fine, let's do that. I'm convinced I need your help to find him. If I haven't convinced you, just tell me how."

  Askew met her stare with his wide-angled gaze. "I still need the details I asked you for."

  So it had come to a trade-off. Susanne felt as though she was being given a lesson in communication and human relations, one she would happily have skipped. When he picked up his notebook she could only resolve to answer all his questions. Her full name, her date and place of birth, her nationality—the quicker she told him all these and the same for Marshall, the sooner the police would track down her son. Askew continued writing deliberately for so long after she'd shot him the answers that her determination not to interrupt him was about to collapse when he said, "Have you a better photograph of him?"

  "Bigger, you mean. There's the one on the mantel, only it's a year old."

  In it Marshall was wearing a tropical shirt and pointing his thumb over his shoulder at three alligators. "Aren't they caged?" Askew said. "They look very close."

  "My husband used a telephoto lens. Marshall wasn't in any danger." Far less than he might be in now, she thought, daring Askew even to hint that he believed she was given to exposing him to danger, and then she realised which photograph she could lend. "Wait," she said, and ran into the dining room to fetch the photograph which the Bushy Road school photographer had made.

  Askew received it with more approval than she had previously seen him admit. "He'll be wearing this uniform, will he?"

  "No." She was so appalled to realise that she hadn't used any of her time to check how he would be dressed that for some seconds she was as dumb as she felt, then her thoughts were too much to contain. "He came home and got changed while I was teaching. That's why I know something's happened He must have meant to be back by the time I was, or he'd have left me a note."

  If Askew challenged that, how much more time might they waste? But he only said, "Are you able to tell us what he will be wearing?"

  "I'm sure I can." Upstairs again, her head beginning lo pound like her heart, she switched on Marshall's light. His uniform was still laid out on the bed, a sight from which she recoiled to examine his other empty clothes, which fell cold and slack as she sorted through them. Once she'd made herself be thorough she checked the washing basket, but his favourite outfit wasn't there either, and so she raced downstairs. "He'll be in a purple Nike track suit," she panted.

  Askew wrote that down. "Shoes?"

  She'd noticed without noticing she had. "White Reebok trainers."

  "Just like my two," Askew said, presumably referring to children rather than footwear, and made a final note as he stood up. "May I
take the photograph?"

  "You'll let me have it back, won't you? Marshall was proud of it." She would have corrected the past tense except that might aggravate her nervousness. She watched Marshall disappear as the policeman turned the photograph away from her, and blurted, "If you need to show his picture on television..."

  "I hope it won't come to that, but if we do?"

  "I was only going to say that the police had a movie crew with them when they were here. Assuming they haven't junked the film, since they won't be able to broadcast it now I'm not to be taken to court, they'll have footage of Marshall."

  "Well look into that should it become necessary, but we wouldn't normally use television until a certain period has elapsed."

  His taking pity on her only made her feel more apprehensive. He wasn't about to specify the period unless she forced him to, and she told herself that she would never need to know. "So," she said, feeling stupid for asking even before she did, "what do I do now?"

  "We'll contact you the moment we have any news. Will you be teaching tomorrow?"

  She found she hadn't wanted to be forced to think that far ahead. "I... shouldn't think so. I'm not sure."

  "I'll take a work number, shall I, just in case."

  Giving him the information felt like inviting worse than she wanted to imagine, but what else could she do? She was on the doorstep now, and the two policemen were outside, their blue uniforms rendered black again by the night between the lonely lamps of the deserted street. Askew poised his pen, and she made the numbers come out of her mouth. The last digit had just left her when the phone rang at her back.

  It was Marshall. She wouldn't have been able to say how she knew, but she saw the police read her conviction in her face. She dashed into the house, away from their scepticism, and flung out one hand to grab the receiver before the answering machine could beat her to the call. Her fingertips knocked the receiver across the table, but she had it as it toppled over the edge, and brought it to her face. "Yes?" she said breathlessly. "Hello?"

  Though the response was faint, it pierced deep into her. It was a squeal lasting less than a second—a strangled cry. She pressed the receiver against her cheek so hard it bruised the bone. "Hello," she pleaded, and heard the noise again, and again, and recognised it as the squeal of the door of a phone booth, opening and closing in a wind. She could hear the wind too, a cold thin sound, and even the creak of the cord from which the receiver in the booth was dangling. Whoever had wanted to speak to her, the night had taken them.

  23 Night

  Marshall was trying to lie absolutely still. He had to stay like that to give the pills his friend had fed him time to finish working. Waves of heat kept passing through him, starting at his marshmallow feet and oozing the length of his defrosting body until they emerged from the top of his head, but though the sensation of something hatching from his scalp made him shudder, he'd more or less stopped shivering. So long as he held his hands over his face to ward off the stale smells of the bed, he wouldn't have to move. What was happening to him was only like having a nightmare, the worst he'd ever had, and he kept almost wakening from it and believing that this time he might find he was home in bed. He could let himself imagine that, because soon he would be. His friend Darren had gone to phone and tell Marshall's mother where to find him.

  Darren had advised him not to move, and Darren's mother was a nurse. So much Marshall had figured out from the way Darren had diagnosed him and been able to provide the right medicine. Marshall was hoping she would come off duty soon and examine him. Meanwhile he could only try to keep his eyes shut as the nightmare rushed him again. He saw himself treading on an anthill like the one he'd overlooked when he was six years old in West Palm Beach, and felt another wave of heat drive the ants out of the holes in his scalp. He had to take a hand away from his face long enough to dig his fingertips into his skull to close as many of the holes as he could locate. Now Max and Vic were forcing his mother to her knees so that George S. could urinate on her, except that as she raised her face into the stream and opened her mouth Marshall saw that the figure standing straddle-legged wasn't George S. but his own father. He smashed a fist into the face that was mirroring his own lopsided grin, and felt his knuckles tingle as his father's head shattered like a wrecked house. He trampled on the eyeballs and ground bits of bone and flesh under his heels, but the lips continued mouthing at him from the mud however much he kicked and stamped on them. "Are you home?" the bruised lips persisted in asking, each question popping a bubble of blood. "Are you home yet?" they asked, until Marshall had to open his eyes so as to stop seeing them—to stop having them inside him.

  The room shuddered on his behalf, and as it steadied he was able to hope for a moment that it would prove to be his. No, it was strewn with unfamiliar clothes, even if some of them were the kind he would wear. Could they be clothes he'd forgotten he'd acquired since emigrating to Britain? Maybe he'd forgotten this was now his room. He didn't mind if it was, so long as it kept still—so long as it and all its contents stopped threatening to change.

  Even worse than that was feeling the same threat inside himself. All the unbearably shameful dreams he'd just had must be part of him, and they showed him he was someone he couldn't bear to know. Maybe he was the boy the smelly room belonged to, or maybe he would be. He was peering out at the clothes which writhed and resettled themselves against the stained walls when he heard someone running toward him.

  He'd been hearing voices ever since his friend had left him, but he'd thought they were on television in the next house. Only the footsteps were outside the bedroom door, and now he realised that the voices had been too. Had they been talking about him—about their plans for him? He used his heels to drag himself farther under the quilt, and clapped his hands over his face, praying that would make him less conspicuous as the door burst open, flinging a gob of pale light off the slab of itself, and launched a figure at him.

  It was Darren, who picked up a receptacle in which he must want Marshall to provide a sample and emptied it over his own head. As Marshall saw it was a baseball cap, Darren towered over him and began to gabble in his face words that smelled of teeth. "You stay like that. There's someone downstairs you won't want to see. Don't come out till I tell you they've gone."

  Had he called Marshall's mother? Marshall was thumbing his lips open behind his hand to whisper the question so that nobody else would hear when Darren hurried out of the room and slammed the door, which sucked the gob of light back onto itself. His footsteps clattered downstairs, and Marshall felt his own spongy body emitting moisture as it struggled to follow. How could he bear to wait when he didn't know about his mother? Then he heard the mutter of a man's voice which sounded as though it was chewing its way through the floor toward him, and he huddled into his lair. If that was the someone his friend had warned him about, he could hear why. He strained his fluttering ears to hear what the voice was saying—please God, not about him—and heard his friend's footsteps go along the hall and out of the house.

  He must be going to phone Marshall's mother. Of course he hadn't had a chance earlier, because the voices had started immediately he'd first left the room, and Marshall had to be as brave as it took now that he was left alone with them. Though now he could hear that one was a woman's, and mustn't she be the nurse? The inkling of hope made the private ward shift, so that he couldn't tell if it was dismayingly enormous or only the size of his head. He eased the quilt off himself, sweating each time he heard it rustle, and lowered himself head first to the floor, testing the boards for creaks with his clammy palms. At last he dared to let his knees touch the wrinkled grubby carpet, and began to crawl toward the door.

  He was engrossed in crawling, in the texture of the carpet beneath his increasingly dirty hands, when he heard footsteps heavier than Darren's enter the house. "Back room, is it, burn?" a new man's voice jabbed, catching him in the stomach.

  Marshall dragged his knees between his fists and crouched over himself fo
r longer than it took him to be sure the man wasn't talking about this bedroom. He wanted to meet the owner of the voice even less than the one who had been speaking to the woman. Even his impression that the floor was extruding splinters through the carpet into his knuckles was unable to move him. Footsteps marched in and out of the house, and then the front door shook it. The footsteps tramped along the hall, and all the voices were shut in a room.

  Marshall lowered himself onto his base, his outstretched legs cracking. He picked at his knuckles with his fingernails, unable to judge whether he was finding any splinters, until it occurred to him that he had to creep out of the house while the people whom he wouldn't want to meet were out of sight—only where were his shoes? Hadn't he left them by the bed?

  He scuttled across the floor, forgetting to be silent, and heaved the quilt onto the mattress. There were his trainers, and near them in the dust he saw the dull glint of a seven-sided twenty-pence coin. He would have taken it except that he'd be stealing from his friend, who had only taken Marshall's money to keep it safe. He was dragging both fat white animals by their thin leashes from under the bed when he heard his friend come into the house.

  His footsteps stopped some way along the hall, where they were met by the worst of the voices, sounding murderous. He mustn't get into trouble, not when he had a message for Marshall. Marshall crawled fast across the carpet, in time to hear the other man's voice say, "Come in as long as you've seen it, Darren, and shut the door."

  He mustn't until he'd given Marshall the message. Marshall staggered to his feet and lurched at the doorknob just as a door slammed downstairs and Darren's voice joined the others in the room. Marshall twisted the knob and pulled the bedroom door open, not least to get rid of the sight of the parody of himself which had come squirming out of the painted surface, and hung onto the frame with both hands. The voices had captured his friend, or could Marshall save him? He sounded as though he didn't want to be saved. Was he trying to distract them so that Marshall could escape?