Tabby seemed to like it.
Ahead, at the reef, they began to rise from the water and clamber up the rock again, spiny and scaled, finned and fearless. Others began to swim out to meet the boat. Of course they recognised her, and she them. She’d sat with nearly a third of them, trying trying trying to break through from the wrong side of the shore.
While they must have schemed like fiends to drag her deep into theirs.
I bring you this gift, she would tell them, if only she could make herself heard over their jeering in her head. Now could you please just set me free?
THE WINNER
by RAMSEY CAMPBELL
UNTIL JESSOP DROVE onto the waterfront he thought most of the wind was racing the moonlit clouds. As the Mini left behind the last of the deserted office buildings he saw ships toppling like city blocks seized by an earthquake. Cars were veering away from the entrance to the ferry terminal. Several minutes of clinging grimly to the wheel as the air kept throwing its weight at the car took him to the gates. A Toyota stuffed with wailing children wherever there was space among the luggage met him at the top of the ramp. “Dublin’s cancelled,” the driver told him in an Ulster accent he had to strain to understand. “Come back in three hours, they’re saying.”
“I never had my supper,” one of her sons complained, and his sister protested “We could have stayed at uncle’s.” Jessop retorted inwardly that he could have delayed his journey by a day, but he’d driven too far south to turn back now. He could have flown from London that morning and beaten the weather if he hadn’t preferred to be frugal. He sent his windblown thanks after the Toyota and set about looking for a refuge on the dock road. There were pubs in abundance, but no room to park outside them and no sign of any other parking area. He was searching for a hotel where he could linger over a snack, and realising that all the hotels were back beyond the terminal entrance, when he belatedly noticed a pub.
It was at the far end of the street he’d just passed. Enough horns for a brass band accompanied the U-turn he made. He swung into the cramped gap between two terraces of meagre houses that opened directly onto the pavement. Two more uninterrupted lines of dwellings so scrawny that their windows were as narrow as their doors faced each other across two ranks of parked cars, several of which were for sale. Jessop parked outside the Seafarer, under the single unbroken street lamp, and retrieved his briefcase from the back seat before locking the car.
The far end of the street showed him windowless vessels staggering about at anchor. A gust blundered away from the pub, carrying a mutter of voices. The window of the pub was opaque except for posters plastered against the inside: THEME NIGHT’s, singa-long’s, quiz night’s. He would rather not be involved in any of those, but perhaps he could find himself a secluded corner in which to work. The lamp and the moon fought over producing shadows of his hand as he pushed open the thick shabby door.
The low wide dim room appeared to be entangled in nets. Certainly the upper air was full of them and smoke. Those under the ceiling trapped rather too much of the yellowish light, while those in the corners resembled overgrown cobwebs. Jessop was telling himself that the place was appealingly quaint when the wind used the door to shove him forward and slammed it behind him.
“Sorry,” he called to the barman and the dozen or so drinkers and smokers seated at round tables cast in black iron. Nobody responded except by watching him cross the discoloured wooden floor to the bar. The man behind it, whose eyes and nose and mouth were crammed into the space left by a large chin, peered at him beneath a beetling stretch of net. Perhaps the dimness was one reason why his eyes bulged so much that they appeared to be stretched pale. “Here’s one,” he announced.
“Reckon you’re right there, cap’n,” growled a man who, despite the competition, would have taken any prize for bulkiness.
“You’d have said it if he hadn’t, Joe,” his barely smaller partner croaked past a hand-rolled cigarette, rattling her bracelets as she patted his arm.
“I’m sorry?” Jessop wondered aloud.
She raised a hand to smooth her shoulder-length red tresses. “We’re betting you went for the ferry.”
“I hope you’ve staked a fortune on it, then.”
“He means you’d win another, Mary,” Joe said. “He wouldn’t want you to lose.”
“That’s so,” Jessop said, turning to the barman. “What do you recommend?”
“Nothing till I know you. There’s not many tastes we can’t please here, mister.”
“Jessop,” Jessop replied before he grasped that he hadn’t been asked a question, and stared hard at the beer-pumps. “Captain’s Choice sounds worth a go.”
He surveyed the length of the chipped sticky bar while the barman hauled at the creaking pump. A miniature billboard said WIN A VOYAGE IN OUR COMPETTITTION, but there was no sign of a menu. “Do you serve food?” he said.
“I’ve had no complaints for a while.”
“What sort of thing do you do?”
“Try me.”
“Would a curry be a possibility? Something along those lines?”
“What do you Southerners think goes in one of them?”
“Anything that’s edible,” said Jessop, feeling increasingly awkward. “That’s the idea of a curry, isn’t it? Particularly on board ship, I should think.”
“You don’t fancy scouse.”
“I’ve never tried it. If that’s what’s on I will.”
“Brave lad,” the barman said and thrust a tankard full of brownish liquid at him. “Let’s see you get that down you.”
Jessop did his best to seem pleased with the inert metallic gulp he took. He was reaching for his wallet until the barman said “Settle when you’re going.”
“Shall I wait here?”
“For what?” the barman said, then grinned at everyone but Jessop. “For your bowl, you mean. We’ll find you where you’re sitting.”
Jessop didn’t doubt it, since nobody made even a token pretence of not watching him carry his briefcase to the only unoccupied corner, which was farthest from the door. As he perched on a ragged leather stool and leaned against the yielding wallpaper under a net elaborated by a spider’s web, a woman who might have been more convincingly blonde without the darkness on her upper lip remarked “That’ll be a good few hours, I’d say.”
“Can’t argue with you there, Betty,” said her companion, a man with a rat asleep on his chest or a beard, which he raised to point it at Jessop. “Is she right, Jessop?”
“Paul,” Jessop offered, though it made him no more comfortable. “A couple, anyway.”
“A couple’s not a few, Tom,” scoffed a man with tattoos of fish and less shapely deep-sea creatures swimming under the cuffs of his shabby brownish pullover.
“What are they else then, Daniel?”
“Don’t fall out over me,” Jessop said as he might have addressed a pair of schoolchildren. “You could both be right, either could, rather.”
Resentment might have been a reason why Daniel jerked one populated thumb at a wiry wizened man topped with a black bobble cap. “He’s already Paul. Got another name so we know who’s who?”
“None I use.”
“Be a love and fish it up for us.”
At least it was Mary who asked in these terms, with a hoarseness presumably born of cigarettes. After a pause Jessop heard himself mumble “Desmond.”
“Scouse,” the barman said—it wasn’t clear to whom or even if it was an order. Hoping to keep his head down, Jessop snapped his briefcase open. He was laying out papers on the table when the street door flew wide, admitting only wind. He had to slap the papers down as the barman stalked to the door and heaved a stool against it. Nobody else looked away from Jessop. “Still a student, are you, Des?” Betty said.
He wouldn’t have believed he could dislike a name more than the one he’d hidden ever since learning it was his, but the contraction was worse. Des Jessop—it was the kind of name a teacher would hiss with conte
mpt. It made him feel reduced to someone else’s notion of him, in danger of becoming insignificant to himself. Meanwhile he was saying “All my life, I hope.”
“You want to live off the rest of us till you’re dead,” Joe somewhat more than assumed.
“I’m saying there’ll always be something left to discover. That ought to be true for everyone, I should think.”
“We’ve seen plenty,” Daniel grumbled. “We’ve seen enough.”
“Forgive me if I haven’t yet.”
“No need for that,” said Mary. “We aren’t forgivers, us.”
“Doesn’t it make you tired, all that reading?” Betty asked him.
“Just the opposite.”
“I never learned nothing from a book,” she said once she’d finished scowling over his words. “Never did me any harm either.”
“You’d know a couple’s not a few if you’d read a bit,” said Joe.
“Lay off skitting at my judy,” Tom warned him.
For some reason everybody else but Jessop roared with laughter. He felt as if his nervous grin had hooked him by the corners of his mouth. He was wobbling to his feet when the barman called “Don’t let them scare you off, Des. They just need their fun.”
“I’m only…” Jessop suspected that any term he used would provoke general mirth. “Where’s the…”
“The poop’s got to be behind you, hasn’t it?” Betty said in gleeful triumph.
Until he glanced in that direction he wasn’t sure how much of a joke this might be. Almost within arm’s length was a door so unmarked he’d taken it for a section of wall. When he pushed it, the reluctant light caught on two faces gouged out of the wood, carvings of such crudeness that the female was distinguishable from her mate only by a mop of hair. Beyond the door was a void that proved to be a corridor once he located a switch dangling from an inch of flex. The luminous rotting pear of a bulb revealed that the short passage led to an exit against which crates of dusty empties were stacked. The barred exit was shaken by a gust of wind and, to his bewilderment, what sounded like a blurred mass of television broadcasts. He hadn’t time to investigate. Each wall contained a door carved with the rudiments of a face, and he was turning away from the Gents before the image opposite alerted him that the man’s long hair was a patch of black fungus. He touched as little of the door as possible while letting himself into the Gents.
The switch in the passage must control all the lights. Under the scaly ceiling a precarious fluorescent tube twitched out a pallid glow with an incessant series of insect clicks. There was barely enough space in the room for a pair of clogged urinals in which cigarette butts were unravelling and a solitary cubicle opposite a piebald slimy sink. Beneath the urinals the wall was bearded with green mould. High up beside the cubicle a token window was covered by a rusty grille restless with old cobwebs. Jessop kicked open the cubicle door.
A watery sound grew louder—an irregular sloshing he’d attributed to the cistern. He urged himself to the seatless discoloured pedestal. The instant he looked down, only the thought of touching the encrusted scabby walls restrained him from supporting himself against them. Whatever was gaping wide-mouthed at him from the black water, surely it was dead, whether it had been drowned by someone or swum up the plumbing. Surely it was the unstable light, not anticipation of him, that made the whitish throat and pale fat lips appear to work eagerly. He dragged one sleeve over his hand and wrenched at the handle of the rickety cistern. As a rush of opaque water carried the mouth into the depths, Jessop retreated to the first urinal and kept a hand over his nose and mouth while he filled the mouldy china oval to its lower brim.
He dodged out of the fluttering room and was nearly at the door to the bar when he faltered. A confusion of angry voices was moving away from him. A clatter of furniture ended it, and a hoarse voice he identified as Betty’s ordered “Now stay there.” He was wishing away the silence as he eased the door open a crack.
The bar seemed emptier than when he’d left it. Two considerable men who’d been seated directly ahead no longer were. The stool hadn’t moved from in front of the exit. Could the men be waiting out of sight on either side for him? As he grew furious with his reluctance to know, the barman saw him. “Food’s on its way,” he announced.
Mary leaned into view, one hand flattening her scalp, to locate Jessop. “Aren’t you coming out? This isn’t hide and seek.”
When embarrassment drove Jessop forward he saw that Daniel had changed seats. He was penned into a corner by the men from the abandoned table, and looked both dishevelled and trapped. “He was trying to see your papers, Des,” Betty said.
“Good heavens, I wouldn’t have minded. It isn’t important.”
“It is to us.”
As Jessop resumed his corner Tom said “Got a sweetheart abroad, have you? Was she the lure?”
“His bonnie lies over the ocean,” Mary took to have been confirmed, and began to sing.
“No he doesn’t,” Jessop retorted, but only to himself while he busied himself with his tankard, which had been topped up in his absence. Once the chorus subsided he said guardedly “No, they’re over here.”
“How many’s that?” enquired Joe. “Bit of a ladies’ man, are you?”
“A girl in every port,” said Tom.
“Not in any really,” Jessop said, risking a laugh he hoped was plainly aimed at himself.
“Same with us,” Daniel said and gave his fellows an ingratiating look.
The microwave behind the bar rang as if signalling the end of a round, which let Jessop watch the barman load a tray and bring it to him. Once the bowlful of grey stew had finished slopping about, Jessop had to unwrap the fork and spoon from their tattered napkin. He was spooning up a blackened lump when Betty said “What do you make of that then, Des?”
This struck Jessop as the latest of several questions too many. “What would you?”
“Oh, we’ve had ours. We gobbled it.”
“Sup up, Des,” Daniel advised. “You’ll get plenty of that where you’re going.”
Was the dish Irish, then? Jessop seemed to have no option other than to raise the dripping lump to his mouth. It was either an unfamiliar vegetable or a piece of meat softened beyond identification, presumably in whatever pot had contained the communal dinner. “Good?” Mary prompted as everyone watched.
“Gum.” At least the mouthful allowed him not to answer too distinctly. He swallowed it as whole as an oyster, only to become aware that his performance had invited however many encores it would take to unload the bowl. He was chewing a chunk that needed a good deal of it when Joe declared “If you’re not a student I’m saying you’re a teacher.”
Jessop succeeded at last in downing and retaining the gristly morsel. “Lecturer,” he corrected.
“Same thing, isn’t it?”
“I wouldn’t say quite.”
“Still teach, don’t you? Still live off them that works, as well.”
“Now, Joe,” Mary interrupted. “You’ll have our new mate not wanting to stay with us.”
Jessop could have told her that had happened some time ago. He was considering how much of his portion he could decently leave before seeking another refuge from the gale, and whether he was obliged to be polite any longer, when Tom demanded “So what do you lecture, Des?”
“Students,” Jessop might have retorted, but instead displayed the Beethoven score he’d laid out to review in preparation for his introductory lecture. “Music’s my territory.”
As he dipped his spoon in search of a final mouthful Mary said “How many marks would our singing get?”
“I don’t really mark performances. I’m more on the theory side.”
Joe’s grunt of disdainful vindication wasn’t enough for Tom, who said “You’ve got to be able to say how good it is if you’re supposed to be teaching about it.”
“Six,” Jessop said to be rid of the subject, but it had occupied all the watching eyes. “Seven,” he amended. “A good s
even. That’s out of ten. A lot of professionals would be happy with that.”
Betty gave a laugh that apparently expressed why everyone looked amused. “You haven’t heard us yet, Des. You’ve got to hear.”
“You start us off, Betty,” Daniel urged.
For as long as it took her to begin, Jessop was able to hope he would be subjected only to a chorus. Having lurched to her feet, she expanded her chest, a process that gave him more of a sense of the inequality of her breasts than he welcomed, and commenced her assault on the song. What was she suggesting ought to be done with the drunken sailor? Her diction and her voice, cracked enough for a falsetto, made it impossible to judge. Jessop fed himself a hearty gulp of Captain’s Choice in case it rendered him more tolerant as she sat down panting. “Oh,” he said hurriedly, “I think—”
“You can’t say yet,” Daniel objected. “You’ve got to hear everyone.”
Jessop lowered his head, not least to avoid watching Mary. Betty’s lopsidedness had begun to resemble an omen. The sound of Mary was enough of an ordeal—her voice even screechier than her friend’s, her answer to the question posed by the song even less comprehensible. “There,” she said far too eventually. “Who’ll be next?”
As Joe stood up with a thump that might have been designed to attract Jessop’s attention, he heaped his spoon with a gobbet of scouse to justify his concentration on the bowl. Once the spoonful passed his teeth it became clear that it was too rubbery to be chewed and too expansive to be swallowed. Before Joe had finished growling his first line, Jessop staggered to his feet. He waved his frantic hands on either side of his laden face and stumbled through the doorway to the toilets.
The prospect of revisiting the Gents made him clap a hand over his mouth. When he elbowed the other door open, however, the Ladies looked just as uninviting. A blackened stone sink lay in fragments on the uneven concrete beneath a rusty drooling tap on a twisted greenish pipe. Jessop ran to the first of two cubicles and shouldered the door aside. Beyond it a jagged hole in the glistening concrete showed where a pedestal had been. What was he to make of the substance like a jellyfish sprawling over the entire rim? Before he could be sure what the jittery light was exhibiting, the mass shrank and slithered into the unlit depths. He didn’t need the spectacle to make him expel his mouthful into the hole and retreat to the corridor. He was peering desperately about for a patch of wall not too stained to lean against when he heard voices—a renewal of the television sounds beyond the rear exit and, more clearly, a conversation in the bar.
Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth Page 27
