“The trestle’s just ahead,” she told Lee, but they spotted it before she finished speaking, its wooden planks spanning the gully below. Only a trickle of water suggested that it had once been a Broad River tributary. “God, this drought. It’s like the whole state is gonna catch on fire.” They walked to the edge of the trestle. Slats in the middle had rotted into the parched channel.
They both spun round at the sound of crashing undergrowth, and Seth’s voice reached them. “Hey, guys! We got some great stuff!” He and Larkin made their way back over to the tracks. “That trestle,” Seth said. “It’s amazing. Like, almost haunting. Look.”
He showed them a long shot of the trestle, standing some way upstream – or what would have been upstream, had there been any water. Next, a shot of broken boards, looking down into the ravine below. “I walked out to the middle,” he said, “as far as I could go.”
Larkin faked a shiver. “You made it look creepy.”
Seth shrugged. “Hey, I think we’re done here. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?” He turned to Charlotte. “You must know, like, some pretty cool place around here we could eat, right? Barbecue or something? Or like soul food?” He didn’t wait for an answer but turned with Larkin and started back along the tracks.
“Right,” Charlotte said, watching them go. “They’re done, so we are too, I guess.”
“I guess,” Lee said.
She walked to the edge of the bank and closed her eyes. She could hear the soft whistle of the train approaching. She took hold of the pennies. In her hand they felt warm, almost alive. Maybe the train would slow, maybe Cade and Vic would lift her up into their arms. She could smell that summer coming nearer. It would be as though no time had passed. Why had she waited so long?
Lee touched her on her back. She knew it was Lee; she could smell his cologne.
“What really happened?” he said. “You were in love and then what happened?”
Charlotte opened her eyes. She said, “I think they went away with the fairies, you know? I just couldn’t go with them.”
The drone of the cicadas and the tree frogs rose to a crescendo, and fell again. She and Lee stood there, the sun dappling through the trees and onto their skin. Their arms glowed golden in its light. Behind them, the trestle groaned and creaked in a wind that did not reach them, and grew silent like the missing and the lost.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The Callers
RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, and still lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964, since when his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk and the movie tie-in Solomon Kane. His short fiction has been widely collected and he has edited a number of anthologies.
More recent publications include two novellas from PS Publishing, The Last Revelation of Gla’aki and The Pretence, and a new collection from Dark Regions Press in America entitled Holes for Faces.
Now well in to his fifth decade as one of the world’s most respected authors of horror fiction, Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award.
About the following story, the author admits: “I’m afraid it betrays how I spend my morning break. By the time The Jeremy Kyle Show comes on TV I’ve usually been working for several hours and have a bit of breakfast then. His show is or used to be sponsored by foxybingo.com, and one of their ads started me thinking about bingo calls.
“That sort of passing thought can be all I need to come up with a story, and here it is. The Jeremy Kyle Show also led to the opening scene and indeed my initial thoughts for The Kind Folk. Nothing is wasted . . .”
MARK’S GRANDMOTHER SEEMS barely to have left the house when his grandfather says “Can you entertain yourself for a bit? I could do with going to the pub while I’ve got the chance.”
Mark wonders how much they think they’ve entertained him, but he only says “Will grandma be all right coming home on her own?”
“Never fret, son. They can look after theirselves.” The old man’s hairy caterpillar eyebrows squirm as he frowns at Mark and blinks his bleary eyes clear. “No call for you to fetch her. It’s women’s stuff, the bingo.” He gives the boy’s shoulder an unsteady squeeze and mutters “You’re a good sort to have around.”
Mark feels awkward and a little guilty that he’s glad he doesn’t have to meet his grandmother. “Maybe I’ll go to a film.”
“You’d better have a key, then.” His grandfather rummages among the contents of a drawer of the shaky sideboard – documents in ragged envelopes, rubber bands so desiccated they snap when he takes hold of them, a balding reel of cotton, a crumpled folder stuffed with photographs – and hauls out a key on a frayed noose of string. “Keep hold of that for next time you come,” he says.
Does he mean Mark will be visiting by himself in future? Was last night’s argument so serious? His mother objected when his grandfather offered him a glass of wine at dinner, and then her mother accused her of not letting Mark grow up. Before long the women were shouting at each other about how Mark’s grandmother had brought up her daughter, and the men only aggravated the conflict by trying to calm it down. It continued after Mark went to bed, and this morning his father informed him that he and Mark’s mother were going home several days early. “You can stay if you like,” she told Mark.
Was she testing his loyalty or hoping he would make up for her behaviour? While her face kept her thoughts to itself his father handed him the ticket for the train home like a business card, one man to another. Mark’s mother spent some time in listing ways he shouldn’t let anyone down, but these didn’t include going to the cinema. Wearing his coat was among the requirements, and so he takes it from the stand in the hall. “Step out, lad,” his grandfather says as Mark lingers on the pavement directly outside the front door. “You don’t want an old crock slowing you down.”
At the corner of the street Mark glances back. The old man is limping after him, resting a hand on the roof of each car parked with two wheels on the pavement. Another narrow similarly terraced street leads into the centre of the small Lancashire town, where lamps on scalloped iron poles are stuttering alight beneath a congested late April sky. Many of the shops are shuttered, and some are boarded up. Just a few couples stroll past deserted pristine kitchens and uninhabited items of attire. Most of the local amusements have grown too childish for Mark, though he might still enjoy bowling or a game of indoor golf if he weren’t by himself, and others are years out of bounds – the pubs, the clubs waiting for the night crowds while doormen loiter outside like wrestlers dressed for someone’s funeral. Surely the cinema won’t be so particular about its customers. More than one of Mark’s schoolmates has shown him the scene from Facecream where the girl gets cream squirted all over her face.
As he hurries past the clubs he thinks a doorman is shouting behind him, but the large voice is down a side street full of shops that are nailed shut. At first he fancies that it’s chanting inside one of them, and then he sees an old theatre at the far end. While he can’t distinguish the words, the rhythm makes it clear he’s hearing a bingo caller. Mark could imagine that all the blank-faced doormen are determined to ignore the voice.
The Frugoplex is beyond the clubs, across a car park for at least ten times as many vehicles as it presently contains. The lobby is scattered with popcorn, handfuls of which have been trodden int
o the purple carpet. A puce rope on metal stilts leads the queue for tickets back and forth and twice again on the way to the counter. When Mark starts to duck under the rope closest to the end of the queue, a man behind the counter scowls at him, and so he follows the rope all the way around, only just heading off two couples of about his own age who stoop under. He’s hoping to avoid the disgruntled man, but the queue brings Mark to him. “Facecream, please,” Mark says and holds out a ten-pound note.
“Don’t try it on with me, laddie,” the man says and turns his glare on the teenagers who have trailed Mark to the counter. “And your friends needn’t either.”
“He’s not our friend,” one of the boys protests.
“I reckon not when he’s got you barred.”
Mark’s face has grown hot, but he can’t just walk away or ask to see a film he’s allowed to watch. “I don’t know about them, but I’m fifteen.”
“And I’m your sweet old granny. That’s it now for the lot of you. Don’t bother coming to my cinema.” The manager tells his staff at the counter “Have a good look at this lot so you’ll know them.”
Mark stumbles almost blindly out of the multiplex. He’s starting across the car park when somebody mutters behind him “He wants his head kicked in.”
They’re only words, but they express his feelings. “That’s what he deserves,” Mark agrees and turns to his new friends.
It’s immediately clear that they weren’t thinking of the manager. “You got us barred,” says the girl who didn’t speak.
“I didn’t mean to. You oughtn’t to have stood so close.”
“Doesn’t matter what you meant,” she says, and the other girl adds “We’ll be standing a lot closer. Standing on your head.”
Mark can’t take refuge in the cinema, but running would look shameful and invite pursuit as well. Instead he tramps at speed across the car park. His shadow lurches ahead, growing paler as it stretches, and before long it has company, jerking forward to catch up on either side of him. He still stops short of bolting but strides faster. He’s hoping passersby will notice his predicament, but either they aren’t interested or they’re determined not to be. At last he reaches the nightclubs, and is opening his mouth to appeal to the nearest doorman when the fellow says “Keep walking, lad.”
“They’re after me.”
The doorman barely glances beyond Mark, and his face stays blank. “Walk on.”
It could be advice, though it sounds like a dismissal. It leaves Mark feeling that he has been identified as an outsider, and he thinks the doormen’s impassive faces are warning him not to loiter. He would make for the police station if he knew where it is. He mustn’t go to his grandparents’ house in case they become scapegoats as well, and there’s just one sanctuary he can think of. He dodges into the side street towards the bingo hall.
The street looks decades older than the main road and as though it has been forgotten for at least that long. Three streetlamps illuminate the cracked roadway bordered by grids that are clogged with old leaves. The glow is too dim to penetrate the gaps between the boards that have boxed up the shopfronts, because the lanterns are draped with grey cobwebs laden with drained insects. The only sign of life apart from a rush of footsteps behind Mark is the amplified voice, still delivering its blurred chant. It might almost be calling out to him, and he breaks into a run.
So do his pursuers, and he’s afraid that the bingo hall may be locked against intruders. Beyond the grubby glass of three pairs of doors the foyer is deserted; nobody is in the ticket booth or behind the refreshment counter. His pursuers hesitate as he sprints to the nearest pair of doors, but when neither door budges, the gang closes in on him. He nearly trips on the uneven marble steps as he stumbles along them. He throws all his weight, such as it is, against the next set of doors, which give so readily that he almost sprawls on the threadbare carpet of the foyer.
The caller seems to raise his voice to greet him. “Sixty-three,” he’s announcing, “just like me.” The pursuers glare at Mark from the foot of the shallow steps. “You can’t stay in there,” one girl advises him, and the other shouts “Better not try.”
All the gang look determined to wait for him. If they don’t tire of it by the time the bingo players go home, surely they won’t dare to let themselves be identified, and so Mark shuts the doors and crosses the foyer. The entrance to the auditorium is flanked by old theatrical posters, more than one of which depicts a plump comedian with a sly schoolboyish face. Mark could imagine they’re sharing a joke about him as he pushes open the doors to the auditorium.
The theatre seats have been cleared out, but the stage remains. It faces a couple of dozen tables, most of which are surrounded by women with score cards in front of them and stumpy pencils in their hands. The stage is occupied by a massive lectern bearing a large transparent globe full of numbered balls. Mark might fancy that he knows why the posters looked secretly amused, because the man in them is behind the lectern. He looks decades older, and the weight of his face has tugged it piebald as well as out of shape, but his grin hasn’t entirely lost its mischief, however worn it seems. Presumably his oversized suit and baggy shirt are meant to appear comical rather than to suggest a youngster wearing cast-off clothes. He examines a ball before returning it to the globe, which he spins on its pivot. “Three and three,” he says as his eyes gleam blearily at Mark. “What do you see?” he adds, and all the women eye the newcomer.
At first Mark can’t see his grandmother. He’s distracted by a lanky angular woman who extends her speckled arms across the table nearest to him. “Lost your mammy, son?” she cries. “There’s plenty here to tend to you.”
For an uneasy moment he thinks she has reached for her breast to indicate how motherly she is, but she’s adjusting her dress, her eagerness to welcome him having exposed a mound of wrinkled flesh. Before he can think of an answer his grandmother calls “What are you doing here, Mark?”
She’s at a table close to the stage. He doesn’t want to make her nervous for him if there’s no need, and he’s ashamed of having run away. The uncarpeted floorboards amplify every step he takes, so that he feels as if he’s trying to sound bigger than he is. All the women and the bingo caller watch his progress, and he wonders if everybody hears him mutter “I went to the cinema but they wouldn’t let me see the film.”
As his grandmother makes to speak one of her three companions leans forward, flattening her forearms on the table to twice their width. “However old are you, son?”
“Mark’s thirteen,” says his grandmother.
Another of her friends nods vigorously, which she has been doing ever since Mark caught sight of her. “Thirteen,” she announces, and many of the women coo or hoot with enthusiasm.
“Looks old enough to me,” says the third of his grandmother’s tablemates, who is sporting more of a moustache than Mark has achieved. “Enough of a man.”
“Well, we’ve shown you off now,” Mark’s grandmother tells him. “I’ll see you back at home.”
This provokes groans throughout the auditorium. The woman who asked his age raises her hands, and her forearms sag towards the elbows. “Don’t keep him to yourself, Lottie.”
The nodding woman darts to grab a chair for him. “You make this the lucky table, Mark.”
He’s disconcerted to observe how frail his grandmother is by comparison with her friends, though they’re at least as old as she is. The bingo caller gives him a crooked grin and shouts “Glad to have another feller here. Safety in numbers, lad.”
Presumably this is a joke of some kind, since quite a few women giggle. Mark’s grandmother doesn’t, but says “Can he have a card?”
This prompts another kind of laughter, and the nodding woman even manages to shake her head. “It’s the women’s game, lad,” the caller says. “Are you ladies ready to play?”
“More than ever,” the moustached woman shouts, which seems somehow to antagonise Mark’s grandmother. “Sit down if you’re going
to,” she says. “Stop drawing attention to yourself.”
He could retort that she has just done that to him. He’s unable to hide his blazing face as he crouches on the spindly chair while the bingo caller elevates the next ball from the dispenser. “Eighty-seven,” he reads out. “Close to heaven.”
The phrase earns mirth and other noises of appreciation as the women duck in unison to their cards. They chortle or grunt if they find the number, grimacing if they fail. Nobody at Mark’s table has located it when the man at the lectern calls “Number forty, old and naughty.”
“That’s us and no mistake,” the moustached woman screeches before whooping at the number on her card.
“Number six, up to tricks.”
“That’s us as well,” her friend cries, but all her nodding doesn’t earn her the number.
“Forty-nine, you’ll be fine.”
The third woman crosses out the number, and flesh cascades down her arm as she lifts the pencil. “He’s that with bells on,” she says, favouring Mark with a wink.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24 (Mammoth Books) Page 18
