“The Puppets” returns to the failed relationship that’s at the heart of “Napier Court”. One crucial disagreement with Rosemary (the real girl) was over horror fiction, which she didn’t care for, not least mine. Dentistry represents or at least is substituted for it in this tale, and the village pageant is an objective correlative for a spectacle Rosemary coaxed out of me, perhaps because she thought it was remote from horror. At a performance in Hoylake of Debussy’s Prélude de l’Après-Midi d’un Faune she was one of the orchestral flautists (not the soloist) and persuaded me to read Mallarmé’s poem as a preamble, in French and then in English, to the hapless audience. When at last I’d struggled through the original in an accent worthy of Inspector Clouseau I looked up to see the mayor of Hoylake on the front row, clutching his head in his hands. Afterwards, having fortified himself with at least one glass of wine, he described my performance as a tour de force. His accent was better than mine had been. Still, I don’t waste material if I can avoid doing so, and a decade later the memory was nothing but fun. According to my diary the writing of the tale (then known as “Curtain Call”) was pretty hesitant, stretching from 29 June 1978 to 8 July. On one day, admittedly with a hangover, I wrote just a single paragraph.
I started “Calling Card” on 24 November 1978 and completed it two days later. At that stage it was called “First Foot”, a reference to a common New Year’s Eve tradition in Britain. It was written in response to a request from the local newspaper for a two-thousand-word ghost story set on Merseyside during the festive season. Alas, the commissioning editor found it too gruesome—presumably he didn’t know the kind of thing I wrote. Lin Carter was made of sterner stuff and bought it for Weird Tales, but told me on the train from New York to a World Fantasy Convention in Providence that the title wouldn’t mean much to his audience. A few minutes later I gave him the title it bears now. Alas, the anthology series died before he could use it, but by a splendid irony a new editor at the local paper asked me for a Christmas tale five years after the original request, and this time the paper published the tale with no changes (except for entitling it “The Calling Card”).
Even more than “The Pattern”, “Above the World” owes much to LSD, especially once the tale climbs to the heights—specifically, the last acid trip I ever took (in July 1976, up Bleaberry Fell near Keswick) before a nightmare flashback some months later put me off the drug. The following June I researched Knox’s ascent to the Bishop of Barf, and the story was written in three days, starting on 18 July. Alas, the Swan Hotel has been turned into apartments. A nearby hotel that closed recently was called Barf House. I wonder if some folk may have found the name ominous, and perhaps a question on the hotel’s web site—“Why Barf?”—didn’t help.
“Baby” began on 29 November 1974 and drew to a close on 4 December, which is pretty well all I know. The entry for the 25th notes “some rather nightmarish pram images” but doesn’t specify them—I’m guessing that an everyday sight set them off in my head, as frequently happens. I suspect it may have been the swollen faceless plastic head, and has the bag of washing in a pram from “Napier Court” found a new lease of grisly life? For some reason I didn’t identify the location by name, but “Baby” is set around Granby Street in Liverpool; in those days finding Chinese vegetables and Indian spices in a grocer’s was worthy of remark. The following year I returned to the area in The Doll Who Ate His Mother.
I recall even less about the genesis of “In the Bag”. The ledger shows only that the first draft was begun on 20 November 1974 and completed two days later. No doubt the sense of random unreasonable severity came from my schooldays, though the headmaster isn’t based on anyone specific. “Conversion” was written on 18 January 1974, but the other EC tale—“Call First”—took all of two days, starting on the 8th. In both cases, as with “Heading Home”, I wrote copious notes at speed and incorporated nearly all of them.
I find this as hard to believe as anybody would, but when I wrote “The Chimney” I didn’t know it was autobiographical. It was conceived on Christmas Day 1972, after Jenny and I had watched that splendid tale of television terror The Stone Tape. “Child afraid of Santa Claus— Perhaps from a very early age has associated horror with the large fireplace in his bedroom? His parents tell him of Santa Claus— But when they tell him the truth about SC, the horror comes flooding back— And something’s always moving in there towards Christmas— He sees it emerge each year: but this year he sees it in more detail…” I got as far as the charred apparition but not, at this stage, its real identity (which, as David Drake pointed out, it has in common with L. P. Hartley’s “Someone in the Lift”, a tale I’d read back in the early fifties). Often my ideas lie low for years, and I didn’t start “The Chimney” until 20 June 1975, finishing it on the 27th. Only when I read the tale aloud at Jack Sullivan’s apartment on the Upper West Side years later did I remember how terrified I’d been on most Christmas Days of my childhood—not by Santa Claus but by having to go upstairs and knock on a bedroom door to invite my unseen father down for dinner. That he stayed unseen, then and for nearly all my childhood and early adulthood, only added to my dread.
And so to “The Companion”, which took years to get itself together. On 30 June 1969 I had an idea about the derelict fairground in New Brighton. At this stage the protagonist is “a young girl, frightened of people generally”. The place seems to be partly operative, with “white faces like papier-mâché at some pay windows”. Two years later I had thoughts about a ghost train in a fairground, but they weren’t incorporated—maybe, having rediscovered them in the process of writing this afterword, I may develop them. Then on 13 September 1973 there’s a page of notes for “The Companion”, including a version of the final line and thoughts for an unused encounter with a fortune-teller. The 14th sees most of the ideas for Stone’s last ride, and the next few days gather more material, but I have to conclude I was writing the story by then. Certainly once Stone heads for the abandoned fairground I finished the tale in a single session.
If I had the time I’d rewrite much of my old stuff, and “The Companion” is a case where I like some of it (the second half) enough to wish the rest were better. Well, my time is limited, and I’d rather work on something new—perhaps I’ll write that ghost train tale from forty years ago. In any case, some people have liked the story—Steve King declared it a favourite, and more recently Jeremy Dyson did. Jeremy and I gave a public reading in Liverpool recently, and “The Companion” seemed to go down pretty well with the audience. Maybe there’s life in these old tales yet, and even in this old writer. I’m happy to see Dark Companions rise from its grave.
Ramsey Campbell
Deep Blue Sea Apartments
Georgioupolis, Crete
20 September 2011
About the Author
The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain and Ghosts Know. Forthcoming is The Kind Folk. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Prism, All Hallows, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.
Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever’s in that pipe. His web site
is at www.ramseycampbell.com.
Look for these titles by Ramsey Campbell
Now Available:
The Seven Days of Cain
Ancient Images
Obsession
The Hungry Moon
Is anyone really innocent?
The Seven Days of Cain
© 2010 Ramsey Campbell
On two continents, weeks apart, two people are brutally murdered: a Barcelona street performer and a New York playwright are each gruesomely tortured to death. In Britain, photographer Andy Bentley begins receiving mysterious emails. The messages refer to the killings and contain hints that the murderer has a personal connection to Andy. But what is it? Are the emails coming from the killer himself? And what, if anything, does Andy’s past have to do with the deaths? As the answers begin to take shape Andy will be forced to confront not only the consequences of his actions, but also the uncertainly of reality itself. Before that happens, how much that he loves will be destroyed?
Enjoy the following excerpt for The Seven Days of Cain:
“Is it you?”
Since she was unable to move her head or her eyes, Serena couldn’t see whoever had spoken. He was just a blurred shape at the edge of her vision until he moved closer, holding up a sheet of paper. It put her in mind of a wanted poster or a leaflet about somebody lost, because it bore a photograph. It was a page from an Internet site called Things To Look Out For In Barcelona. “Did you know you were famous?” the man said.
She was disconcerted to find that she couldn’t recall ever having seen a picture of herself, however often she’d been aware of tourists taking them. The photograph was captioned The secret statue, and showed her very much as she imagined she was now, her large eyes and faintly tanned thin face intent on the view straight ahead, one finger miming pensiveness as it rested against her nearly invisible lips to indicate the tip of her snub nose. While the image didn’t take up much of the page, she couldn’t read the text without shifting her eyes. She’d resisted many determined attempts to trick her into abandoning her stance, but it took an effort to hold her vision still as the man took the page out of sight. “Penny for them,” he said.
Though she must have heard the phrase a dozen times or more, just now it sounded like an unwelcome reminder. It made her aware of all the newspaper kiosks around her on the boulevard. She was trying to recapture the peace that the shade of the plane trees and the clamour of caged birds usually gave her—the sense of standing in the depths of a forest even though she was surrounded by an ever-changing crowd on a pavement that divided four lanes of traffic—when he said “How much do you want to talk?”
What made him think she wanted to at all? She was happiest when she was quiet. She didn’t understand his question until he showed her a twenty-euro note. Instead of adding it to the coins on her supine rucksack he doubled the amount. “Say when you want me to stop,” he said.
Serena was reminded of the night several English football fans had mistaken her for one of the prostitutes who loitered at the seaward end of the boulevard. She’d never been so glad to have a bicycle. She didn’t need memories like that; she didn’t need many at all. The man beside her was showing her another twenty; another, another… “That’s one for each day of the week,” he eventually said.
It was enough to buy space in a camp by the beach for a month. However safe she found pitching her tent in a cove so secluded that nobody else seemed to suspect its existence, she might like to feel safer just now. All the same, she’d seen ten notes before she let go of the bicycle that was propped against a lamp-standard. “What exactly do you think you’re buying?”
“Whatever you can give me.”
The sun was in Serena’s eyes now that she was facing him, and she couldn’t make out his expression. His features were almost as blurred as her picture, a featureless silhouette the sun was projecting through the page in his hand. “Is that you?” she said, pointing at the blank side of the page.
“Is this my site, do you mean? I’m from another one entirely, and I’d like to do an interview.”
“Where?”
“Wherever you prefer. Right here if it’s where you’re most comfortable.”
“We could sit down at least.” As he looked around for seats she said “Will you be showing me where you’re from?”
“I’ve printed nothing else out if that’s what you mean. Don’t talk if you think it could harm you somehow,” he said and glanced past her at the human statues stationed all the way along the Ramblas to Placa de la Catalunya. “I expect some of your competitors would welcome a fee for a chat.”
Serena didn’t know why she was hesitating. Where was the risk in the midst of the evening crowds? “Never mind them,” she said and took the notes out of his hand.
She slipped them inside her jacket and stooped to gather up the coins scattered on her rucksack. As she made to rest it on the handlebars of the bicycle he said “Allow me. We don’t want you thinking I’m no gentleman.”
He mimed surprise at the weight of the bag. “Is this all there is to you?”
Serena laughed at least as much for her own benefit as his. “I’ve got a locker at the station.”
“It still doesn’t seem much to show for a life.” As though the question followed he said “Do you drink?”
“When I’m thirsty.”
“Everything a person’s meant to do, is that the trick?” By the time Serena deduced that he had in mind statues that came to life, he was saying “Let me buy you one.”
“I wouldn’t mind a coffee,” Serena said.
She wheeled the bicycle to an outpost of a café, where she chained the bicycle to a lamp-standard. Her host sat beside it and planted the rucksack on the chair next to him. Once a waitress had dodged across the road to take his order for two coffees, he inched his chair out of the shade of a plane tree. “So tell me your story,” he said.
The sun was in Serena’s eyes again, and she might have fancied he was gazing at her out of a jungle that teemed with all the birds she could hear in the cages behind him. “Where would you like me to start?” she said.
“Where you come from.”
It sounded like the simplest of questions, but it reminded her of far too much. She was attempting to take refuge in the present when he said “I’m not prying, am I?”
“I expect that’s your job.”
“There’s a lot more to me than that.” Less forcefully he said “Tell me how you started doing what you do.”
“It was someone else’s idea really.” This seemed to threaten her with memories too, and so she tried saying “I suppose I just showed up in the right place at the right time.”
“Which were those?”
“I was watching someone else stay still.” She couldn’t help feeling grateful that this memory was vivid—the figure painted as white as his toga and the pillar he was leaning on. “People thought I was being a statue as well,” she said, “and threw money where they do.”
It had felt like being accepted for herself and becoming her own inner stillness. “At your feet, you mean,” he said. “How long have been people been paying their tributes?”
Serena was distracted by the coffees the waitress brought. The tiny cups reminded her of a dolls’ tea party—a game in a garden swimming with shadows of foliage, just like the table on the Ramblas—though she’d never been invited to one. The thought led somewhere she was anxious to avoid, and she tried to find an answer that would keep it distant. “Ever since,” she said.
“You haven’t made yourself up. You don’t want to be like the rest, is that the plan?”
“I wasn’t made up the first time. I’ve never felt I needed to be since.”
“You aren’t trying not to be noticed.”
“I’m happy if people do but I won’t be upset if they don’t. I’m happy to be alive, that’s all.”
“Sounds like a fairy tale.”
“It’s real, though.”
As her companion
gazed at her, a caged bird uttered a chattering scream that she could easily have taken for laughter. “When did you realise you were being looked for?” the man said.
For a moment the question made Serena feel as trapped as the bird, and she tried to sound careless. “Who’s looking?”
“Some of the people who’ve seen this, do you think?” He held up the printout and read “Keep an eye out for the pensive lady of the Ramblas, the subtlest of the living sculptures. You’ll know her by her bike and rucksack. She’ll move if you pay her, but try asking her to speak. Good luck with finding out her name.”
“It’s Serena.”
“And I’m Dias.”
“That’s a good Portuguese name.” When the sunlight through the foliage jittered in her eyes she said “Do you mind if we sit somewhere else? I’d like to be able to see.”
“Let’s move on by all means. Do you know what I’d like to see you doing?”
So that was why he’d paid so much, she thought, and all his talk was only a preamble. “I’ve no idea,” she said and wished it were the truth.
“No need to think I’m whatever you’re thinking I am. I’d just like to watch you work. I didn’t have much time before.”
“Where are you asking me to go?”
“Wherever you feel at home,” Dias said and raised a lazy fist to point behind him with his thumb. “Along here?”
Beyond the cages were the flower market and the jewellery stalls and finally the whores, if it wasn’t too early for them. A parrot uttered some remark as though Dias had given it a cue, and Serena pointed in the opposite direction. “That’s more me.”
Dark Companions Page 32
