The hall was dimly lit, and he stuck out his head, looked both ways, saw no one. The door of the room across the hall was closed, and he stepped across to it and pushed gently. It swung silently inward, and when it was just wide enough to admit his shoulder, he passed through the opening and let the door drift shut.
The room glowed with pale yellow from a night light plugged into a wall socket near Mrs. Wilson’s bed. It was ceramic, and shaped like a quarter moon. There was a face sculpted on the inner edge, the mouth of which neither smiled nor frowned, and said nothing.
Mrs. Wilson was asleep, her head turned toward the wall, away from Richards. Mrs. Jenks lay on her back, her eyes closed, breathing deeply under the sheet and blanket. Richards very gently shook her, but she did not awaken. He put the wash cloth over her mouth, then put tape over it and around her head, lifting it from the pillow. By the time he had finished putting tape around her wrists, she was starting to stir, and he wrenched her arms up, and wound the tape around the top two legs of the bed.
He was relieved to see that Mrs. Jenks did not kick with her as yet unsecured legs. She tried, but whatever kept her in a wheelchair also prevented her from thrashing about, and Richards realized that there was no need to tape her legs. They would stay in whatever position he put them. All in all, it seemed quite safe. There were whines and moans from beneath the wash cloth, but nothing that would carry to the next room, and sleeping Mrs. Wilson was stone deaf, mercifully for her and Richards both.
But before Richards took out Anderson’s fudge knife, he did one more thing. He walked to the window and opened it. Even at midnight, the air was unseasonably warm, and Richards thought he could scent the promise of spring in it. He stood there for a long time, marveling at the way life occasionally worked out, how the little things blended together so that loose ends could be tied up, so that an old man could die happy, possessed by yesterday’s memories, while creating new ones. He sighed, remembering, measuring out his years in crimson drops, uncounted seams of flesh, marking the red and yellow days that had brought him to this final, perfect day.
Then he smiled, and turned for the last time to his occupation, his heart’s work, his soul’s dream. He worked on into the night, not realizing that Mrs. Wilson had awakened, turned, and observed his ministrations with as much concern and as much knowledge of what was happening as the wide-eyed, expressionless, ceramic moon. Had he known, he might have welcomed the audience, but his attention was so fixed on Mrs. Jenks that he did not.
So Mrs. Wilson and the moon continued to watch until the darkness faded and Richards’s heart burst with the passion that his frail body could no longer bear, and sunbeams appeared on the ceiling, worked their way down the wall, and lit the tableau of joy and death just in time for Marianne to see it as she entered the room, screaming and dropping the little tray that held pills in paper cups. The scream brought others into the room, and Anderson, leaning on his walker, saw and trembled.
“He’ll burn in hell,” Anderson said, not knowing with what ease Richards had died on this glorious morning, this most perfect of days.
SEE HOW THEY RUN by Ramsey Campbell
Ramsey Campbell has appeared in virtually every volume of The Year’s Best Horror Stories since the first volume (including those edited by my two predecessors, Richard Davis and Gerald W. Page). I for one am growing tired of writing introductions to his stories each year. I mean, what can I tell you that is new? Did you know that Campbell once owned a wine-drinking rabbit named Flopsy? Died of liver failure. Don’t know if they et it.
Born in Liverpool on January 4, 1946, Campbell has gone from teenaged Arkham House prodigy and protégé to one of the foremost horror writers ever. Much of this at the expense of his native Liverpool, which he has repeatedly used as setting for his twisted explorations of the strange and disturbing. Point of fact, last year Tor Books published a new collection of Campbell’s stories, Strange Things and Stranger Places. Campbell now lives in Merseyside with wife and two maniac children. He has had numerous anthologies (which he has edited), short story collections (which he has written), and novels (beginning with The Doll Who Ate His Mother). Don’t venture out in Liverpool after dark. Asked about his latest project, Campbell reports: “Right now I’m working on a new novel, The One Safe Place. Sounds like a fishmonger.” That’s an English joke. Doubt the novel is.
Throughout the reading of the charges Foulsham felt as if the man in the dock was watching him. December sunshine like ice transmuted into illumination slanted through the high windows of the courtroom, spotlighting the murderer. With his round slightly pouting face and large dark moist eyes Fishwick resembled a schoolboy caught red-handed, Foulsham thought, except that surely no schoolboy would have confronted the prospect of retribution with such a look of imperfectly concealed amusement mingled with impatience.
The indictment was completed. “How do you plead?”
“Not guilty,” Fishwick said in a high clear voice with just a hint of mischievous emphasis on the first word. Foulsham had the impression that he was tempted to take a bow, but instead Fishwick folded his arms and glanced from the prosecuting counsel to the defense, cueing their speeches so deftly that Foulsham felt his own lips twitch.
“... a series of atrocities so cold-blooded that the jury may find it almost impossible to believe that any human being could be capable of them ...” “... evidence that a brilliant mind was tragically damaged by a lifetime of abuse ...” Fishwick met both submissions with precisely the same attitude, eyebrows slightly raised, a forefinger drumming on his upper arm as though he were commenting in code on the proceedings. His look of lofty patience didn’t change as one of the policemen who had arrested him gave evidence, and Foulsham sensed that Fishwick was eager to get to the meat of the case. But the judge adjourned the trial for the day, and Fishwick contented himself with a faint anticipatory smirk.
The jurors were escorted past the horde of reporters and through the business district to their hotel. Rather to Foulsham’s surprise, none of his fellow jurors mentioned Fishwick, neither over dinner nor afterward, when the jury congregated in the cavernous lounge as if they were reluctant to be alone. Few of the jurors showed much enthusiasm for breakfast, so that Foulsham felt slightly guilty for clearing his plate. He was the last to leave the table and the first to reach the door of the hotel, telling himself that he wanted to be done with the day’s ordeal. Even the sight of a newsvendor’s placard which proclaimed FISHWICK JURY SEE HORROR PICTURES TODAY failed to deter him.
Several of the jurors emitted sounds of distress as the pictures were passed along the front row. A tobacconist shook his head over them, a gesture which seemed on the point of growing uncontrollable. Some of Foulsham’s companions on the back row craned forward for a preview, but Foulsham restrained himself; they were here to be dispassionate, after all. As the pictures came toward him, their progress marked by growls of outrage and murmurs of dismay, he began to feel unprepared, in danger of performing clumsily in front of the massed audience. When at last the pictures reached him, he gazed at them for some time without looking up.
They weren’t as bad as he had secretly feared. Indeed, what struck him most was their economy and skill. With just a few strokes of a black felt-tipped pen, and the occasional embellishment of red, Fishwick had captured everything he wanted to convey about his subjects: the grotesqueness which had overtaken their gait as they attempted to escape once he’d severed a muscle; the way the crippled dance of each victim gradually turned into a crawl—into less than that once Fishwick had dealt with both arms. No doubt he’d been as skillful with the blade as he was with the pen. Foulsham was reexamining the pictures when the optician next to him nudged him. “The rest of us have to look, too, you know.”
Foulsham waited several seconds before looking up. Everyone in the courtroom was watching the optician now—everyone but Fishwick. This time there was no question that the man in the dock was gazing straight at Foulsham, whose face stiffened into a mask he
wanted to believe was expressionless. He was struggling to look away when the last juror gave an appalled cry and began to crumple the pictures. The judge hammered an admonition, the usher rushed to reclaim the evidence, and Fishwick stared at Foulsham as if they were sharing a joke. The flurry of activity let Foulsham look away, and he did his best to copy the judge’s expression of rebuke tempered with sympathy for the distressed woman.
That night he couldn’t get to sleep for hours. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw the sketches Fishwick had made. The trial wouldn’t last forever, he reminded himself; soon his life would return to normal. Every so often, as he lay in the dark which smelled of bath soap and disinfectant and carpet shampoo, the taps in the bathroom released a gout of water with a choking sound. Each time that happened, the pictures in his head lurched closer, and he felt as if he was being watched. Would he feel like that over Christmas if, as seemed likely, the trial were to continue into the new year? But it lacked almost a week to Christmas when Fishwick was called to the witness box, and Fishwick chose that moment, much to the discomfiture of his lawyer, to plead guilty after all.
The development brought gasps from the public gallery, an exodus from the press benches, mutters of disbelief and anger from the jury; but Foulsham experienced only relief. When the court rose, as though to celebrate the turn of events, he thought the case was over until he saw that the judge was withdrawing to speak to the lawyers. “The swine,” the tobacconist whispered fiercely, glaring at Fishwick. “He made all those people testify for nothing.”
Soon the judge and the lawyers returned. It had apparently been decided that the defense should call several psychiatrists to state their views of Fishwick’s mental condition. The first of them had scarcely opened his mouth, however, when Fishwick began to express impatience as severe as Foulsham sensed more than one of the jurors was suffering. The man in the dock protruded his tongue like a caricature of a madman and emitted a creditable imitation of a jolly banjo which all but drowned out the psychiatrist’s voice. Eventually the judge had Fishwick removed from the court, though not without a struggle, and the psychiatrists were heard.
Fishwick’s mother had died giving birth to him, and his father had never forgiven him. The boy’s first schoolteacher had seen the father tearing up pictures Fishwick had painted for him. There was some evidence that the father had been prone to uncontrollable fits of violence against the child, though the boy had always insisted that he had broken his own leg by falling downstairs. All of Fishwick’s achievements as a young man seemed to have antagonized the father—his exercising his leg for years until he was able to conceal his limp, his enrollment in an art college, the praise which his teachers heaped on him and which he valued less than a word of encouragement from his father. He’d been in his twenties, and still living with his father, when a gallery had offered to exhibit his work. Nobody knew what his father had said which had caused Fishwick to destroy all his paintings in despair and to overcome his disgust at working in his father’s shop in order to learn the art of butchery. Before long he had been able to rent a bed-sitter, and thirteen months after moving into it he’d tracked down one of his former schoolfellows who used to call him Quasimodo on account of his limp and his dispirited slouch. Four victims later, Fishwick had made away with his father and the law had caught up with him.
Very little of this had been leaked to the press. Foulsham found himself imagining Fishwick brooding sleeplessly in a cheerless room, his creative nature and his need to prove himself festering within him until he was unable to resist the compulsion to carry out an act which would make him feel meaningful. The other jurors were less impressed. “I might have felt some sympathy for him if he’d gone straight for his father,” the hairdresser declared once they were in the jury room.
Fishwick had taken pains to refine his technique first, Foulsham thought, and might have said so if the tobacconist hadn’t responded. “I’ve no sympathy for that cold fish,” the man said between puffs at a briar. “You can see he’s still enjoying himself. He only pleaded not guilty so that all those people would have to be reminded what they went through.”
“We can’t be sure of that,” Foulsham protested.
“More worried about him than about his victims, are you?” the tobacconist demanded, and the optician intervened. “I know it seems incredible that anyone could enjoy doing what he did,” she said to Foulsham, “but that creature’s not like us.”
Foulsham would have liked to be convinced of that. After all, if Fishwick weren’t insane, mustn’t that mean anyone was capable of such behavior? “I think he pleaded guilty when he realized that everyone was going to hear all those things about him he wanted to keep secret,” he said. “I think he thought that if he pleaded guilty the psychiatrists wouldn’t be called.”
The eleven stared at him. “You think too much,” the tobacconist said.
The hairdresser broke the awkward silence by clearing her throat. “I never thought I’d say this, but I wish they’d bring back hanging just for him.”
“That’s the Christmas present he deserves,” said the veterinarian who had crumpled the evidence.
The foreman of the jury, a bank manager, proposed that it was time to discuss what they’d learned at the trial. “Personally, I don’t mind where they lock him up so long as they throw away the key.”
His suggestion didn’t satisfy most of the jurors. The prosecuting counsel had questioned the significance of the psychiatric evidence, and the judge had hinted broadly in his summing-up that it was inconclusive. It took all the jurors apart from Foulsham less than half an hour to dismiss the notion that Fishwick might have been unable to distinguish right from wrong, and then they gazed expectantly at Foulsham, who had a disconcerting sense that Fishwick was awaiting his decision, too. “I don’t suppose it matters where they lock him up,” he began, and got no further; the rest of the jury responded with cheers and applause, which sounded ironic to him. Five minutes later they’d agreed to recommend a life sentence for each of Fishwick’s crimes. “That should keep him out of mischief,” the bank manager exulted.
As the jury filed into the courtroom, Fishwick leaned forward to scrutinize their faces. His own was blank. The foreman stood up to announce the verdict, and Foulsham was suddenly grateful to have that done on his behalf. He hoped Fishwick would be put away for good. When the judge confirmed six consecutive life sentences, Foulsham released a breath which he hadn’t been aware of holding. Fishwick had shaken his head when asked if he had anything to say before sentence was passed, and his face seemed to lose its definition as he listened to the judge’s pronouncement. His gaze trailed across the jury as he was led out of the dock.
Once Foulsham was out of the building, in the crowded streets above which glowing Santas had been strung up, he didn’t feel as liberated as he’d hoped. Presumably that would happen when sleep had caught up with him. Just now he was uncomfortably aware how all the mannequins in the store windows had been twisted into posing. Whenever shoppers turned from gazing into a window he thought they were emerging from the display. As he dodged through the shopping precinct, trying to avoid shoppers rendered angular by packages, families mined with small children, clumps of onlookers surrounding the open suitcases of street traders, he felt as if the maze of bodies were crippling his progress.
Foulsham’s had obviously been thriving in his absence. The shop was full of people buying Christmas cards and rolled-up posters and framed prints. “Are you glad it’s over?” Annette asked him. “He won’t ever be let out, will he?”
“Was he as horrible as the papers made out?” Jackie was eager to know.
“I can’t say. I didn’t see them,” Foulsham admitted, experiencing a surge of panic as Jackie produced a pile of tabloids from under the counter. “I’d rather forget,” he said hastily.
“You don’t need to read about it, Mr Foulsham, you lived through it,” Annette said. “You look as though Christmas can’t come too soon for you.”
“If I oversleep tomorrow I’ll be in on Monday,” Foulsham promised, and trudged out of the shop.
All the taxis were taken, and so he had to wait almost half an hour for a bus. If he hadn’t been so exhausted he might have walked home. As the bus laboured uphill he clung to the dangling strap which was looped around his wrist and stared at a grimacing rubber clown whose limbs were struggling to unbend from the bag into which they’d been forced. Bodies swayed against him like meat in a butcher’s lorry, until he was afraid of being trapped out of reach of the doors when the bus came to his stop.
As he climbed his street, where frost glittered as if the tarmac were reflecting the sky, he heard children singing carols in the distance or on television. He let himself into the house on the brow of the hill, and the poodles in the ground-floor flat began to yap as though he were a stranger. They continued barking while he sorted through the mail which had accumulated on the hall table: bills, advertisements, Christmas cards from people he hadn’t heard from since last year. “Only me, Mrs Hutton,” he called as he heard her and her stick plodding through her rooms toward the clamor. Jingling his keys as further proof of his identity, and feeling unexpectedly like a jailor, he hurried upstairs and unlocked his door.
Landscapes greeted him. Two large framed paintings flanked the window of the main room: a cliff bearing strata of ancient stone above a deserted beach, fields spiky with hedgerows and tufted with sheep below a horizon where a spire poked at fat clouds as though to pop them; beyond the window, the glow of streetlamps streamed downhill into a pool of light miles wide from which pairs of headlight beams were flocking. The pleasure and the sense of all-embracing calm which he habitually experienced on coming home seemed to be standing back from him. He dumped his suitcase in the bedroom and hung up his coat, then he took the radio into the kitchen.
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