The Count of Eleven

by Ramsey Campbell

  Gavin hadn't struck Jack as needing to diet. He looked thinner and more haggard than the last time they had met. Jack watched him sprint across the road, then he moved the briefcase from the back of the van onto the passenger seat before driving off.

  Five minutes later he was at the motorway. Beyond the starting line marked by traffic lights hitch-hikers held up placards naming towns. Jack stayed in the outer lane until he'd outdistanced the rest of the traffic. Whatever had been wrong with the van seemed to have righted itself, and he didn't slow down until he reached the first exit to Warrington.

  The gentle slope of the road curved gradually between field and solitary houses selling vegetables and eggs. At Great Sankey the houses started to cluster, and the road became a dual carriage way shaded by trees and divided by a wide strip like an elongated football field. Soon Jack had to brake for the centre of Warrington, a maze populated by shoppers and walled in by store-fronts. It didn't faze him. Even when the road sprouted concrete roundabouts and split into lanes painted with destination numbers, he knew where he was bound: through the centre and out again towards the other motorway. Road signs shone green as traffic lights as they caught the sunlight, and in five minutes he was driving leisurely along the road he had located on the map.

  Long blocks of thin-faced houses, packed with bay windows and interrupted only by narrow side streets, enclosed the road, which felt to Jack as much like a prolonged village as part of a town. A few minutes later it crossed a canal staked out by fishermen. He parked the van in a side street near a building society and a bank, and walked the last few blocks.

  He had every reason to expect Enid Bellows' shop to be in the side street to which he had addressed the letter, and a van marked BELLOWS FLORISTS was. The street, however, consisted of two terraces like reflections of each other; there was no sign of a shop. He turned back to the main road, and a scent of flowers reached him through the air that was heavy with heat and exhaust fumes. The shop was on the opposite corner of the junction, which seemed to be just about the busiest part of the road.

  He made sure the briefcase was securely fastened as he crossed to the florist's. Beyond a window banked with flowers he saw a man and a woman behind a counter at the back of the shop. The man was leafing through slips of paper, the woman was arranging a wreath. With all the flowers in the window Jack found it gratifyingly difficult to see into the shop.

  Presumably the woman was Enid Bellows, but he needed her to be alone. He walked to the end of the block, past a greengrocer's and a post office, and strolled back. Could he call the man out of the shop on some pretext? He supposed he could regard this visit as spying out the situation, except that doing so little felt like putting Julia at risk.

  He pretended to examine the display outside the greengrocer's while he tried to plan, and when nothing useful occurred to him he went in to buy a pound of Granny Smiths in case anyone had noticed him dawdling. Before leaving the shop he put the bag of apples in the briefcase, where they nestled against the blow lamp except for one apple into which he bit. The green sharpness seemed to blaze through his teeth into his skull as he stepped onto the pavement and saw the man who had been behind the florist's counter emerging from the shop.

  Jack walked to the post office next door to the florist's and faced the advertising postcards in the window while he spied sidelong on the man. Whenever he remembered not to look conspicuous he bit into the fruit and glanced at the postcards, at least three of which advertised the value of his name: a house numbered 11, the digits of a postcode, two consecutive digits of a phone number. He had just located the third appearance of eleven when the florist's van turned out of the side street and chugged towards the centre of Warrington, trailing smoke.

  Jack took a last bite of the apple, crunching a seed between his teeth, and dropped the core on top of a newspaper in a waste-bin, obscuring whatever the headline said. Either the man was delivering flowers or he'd taken the van to be overhauled; in either case he ought to be gone for a while. Swinging his briefcase jauntily, Jack was at the florist's in two strides.

  Nobody was in the shop, not even the florist. There must be a back room, out of sight from the street. A bell pinged like a timer as Jack closed the door behind him. None of the passers-by so much as glanced at him as he pushed down the catch on the Yale lock and turned the placard outwards so that it said CLOSED to the world. "I'll be with you now," the woman called from the back room.

  Jack had just counted eleven when she came to the counter. She was larger than she had appeared through the wreath, but otherwise nondescript: brownish hair which looked less natural than uncombable, a rotund face whose plumpness blurred its features. "How can I help?" she said.

  "Help what?" Jack Awkward might have said or thought of saying, but he had to be quick and decisive; there was no telling how soon she might notice that the door was locked. He snapped the briefcase open. "I wrote to you."

  "Did you? That's nice. I look forward to the postman's knock." She leaned her hands on the counter with two wooden thuds, the second of which sounded like an echo. "Don't I know you?" she said.

  Jack gazed into the depths of the briefcase. The nozzle of the blow lamp made him think of the snout of some creature holding itself still in its lair. "I do know you," the florist said. "Give us a clue, come on."

  Jack gazed at her and reached into the briefcase. "I know that grin," she said, and slapped her cheek lightly with her left hand, two fingers of which had knuckles wrapped in plaster. "It was at her wedding up the road. Weren't those your little ones everyone remarked on?"

  "Depends what they were saying about them."

  "They were a delight, that's what everyone said." She peered at him with a comical grimace that discovered dozens of wrinkles around her eyes, then her face relaxed. Tom, that's your name."

  "And you're Enid."

  That's me all over," she said, gesturing as though she was sketching a larger and more shapeless body for herself, and cocked her head on one side, rucking the flesh of her neck. "But I don't remember you writing to me."

  "It was about luck."

  "Well, we can all use more of that," she said, and glanced past him. "Let him in, will you?"

  Jack turned his head without moving his body, and realised that by standing midway between the counter and the door he was blocking her view of the placard. A boy in his mid teens with a luminous green headband was shading his eyes and squinting through the glass. Sunlight on it seemed to be the problem, and Jack thought it unlikely that the boy could distinguish his face. He drew a breath which tasted of flowers and more faintly of gas, and as he did so the boy stepped back and ran across the road to flag down a bus. "Impatient customer," Jack said, and found that Enid Bellows was gazing at him. "I've remembered," she told him.

  As his grip on the briefcase shifted, the blow lamp touched the back of his other hand. Perhaps because of the unexpectedness, the metal felt suddenly hot. "Remembered," he said.

  "What you must have sent me. The letter that's supposed to bring good luck."

  "And did it?"

  "I hope it will."

  Jack's hand hesitated between the wad of letters and the blow lamp "What have you done with it?"

  She raised her eyebrows as if she had already answered him. "Sent copies to the next thirteen customers who came in after I got it. You never know what may help, I always say, though the old man shouts at me if I so much as cross the road instead of walking under a ladder."

  "You never know where help may come from."

  Jack felt both relieved and robbed of impetus, and stood with his hand in the briefcase until she spoke again. "Was that all you wanted?"

  Jack snapped the briefcase shut. "No, I'd like a bouquet for my wife."

  "They start at six pounds, or seven delivered."

  "Six will be fine," Jack said, moving to the door. "I'll just be popping in the post office while you make it up."

  As she turned towards the back room he reversed the placard and p
ushed up the catch on the lock, muffling the click with the heel of his hand. Having walked slowly to the end of the block, he returned to the florist's. His surroundings seemed to have brightened and clarified, as though the sunlight was penetrating everything it touched. Enid Bellows looked up from wrapping the bouquet in cellophane, and he saw that her features were by no means unclear now that he was familiar with them. He experienced a surge of affection and well-being as she said "What's her name?"

  "Who?"

  "Your lady love," she said, tutting at his forgetfulness.

  "Julia."

  "Really? I thought—"

  She looked embarrassed; perhaps she thought she'd caused him to betray himself. "Take a card," she said.

  "Why, are you going to show me a trick?"

  She emitted a sound as much like a groan as a laugh. "You're too quick for me. I should have remembered from the wedding."

  Jack selected a card from the revolving stand, and she clipped it to the cellophane. "Remember me to your wife," she said as he reached the door, "and, oh—"

  Jack halted with one hand on the latch. "You've remembered something else?"

  "Remind her she was going to drop me in a recipe the next time she was passing."

  "Are you certain that was Julia? It doesn't sound like her."

  "I keep thinking that wasn't her name." The florist lifted a flap of the counter and stumped over to open the door for him. "Maybe the old brains are addled. Maybe it was three other people."

  "Aren't we all," Jack said, and headed for the van, where he stood the bouquet on the passenger seat and held it upright with the briefcase. Soon the streets fell behind, and the road swooped between fields to the motorway. He wasn't at all surprised to find he was joining it at junction 11, nor that the first junction after 12 was 14. Of course it was silly to imagine that the landscape had somehow been arranged as a sign to him, but he felt that the family's bad luck might have disappeared as though, like junction 13, it had never been. Thank you, Enid Bellows," he murmured as the scent of flowers filled the front of the van.

  TWENTY-NINE

  On Sunday afternoon he was back on that stretch of motorway. As he drove up the ramp at junction 14, towards a sky like an inverted sea inhabited by a single glinting fish, Laura said "Do you think we'll ever get a car?"

  "Why, are you tired of Old Faithful?"

  "I just feel a bit sick sometimes. Maybe it's riding in the front, or the petrolly smell."

  "Perhaps we could fix up a seat in the back," Julia said.

  "It wouldn't be safe," Jack told her. "Don't we all quite like riding in the front like this? We won't be together for ever."

  "You don't have to say that," Laura protested. "You'll bring us bad luck."

  "I'll do my best not to," Jack said, driving around the ample roundabout at the top of the ramp and taking the Helsby road. "And I'll see what I can do about the petroleous smell."

  "You made that word up."

  "How much do you bet?"

  "Everything we've got."

  "Then we'll have nothing, because you'll find the word in the dictionary if you look it up." When Laura glanced at him, hoping he was joking, he said "It's a good job I didn't take your bet."

  Traffic lights halted the van at the edge of Helsby, and Jack patted her hand. He wanted her and Julia to share his optimism. Though he hadn't yet been able to contrive himself the chance to visit any of his addressees since meeting Enid Bellows, his encounters with her and with Gavin had left him with a lasting sense of rightness. Returning to Helsby wasn't just a celebration, it was a way of proving to himself that he and the family had nothing to fear.

  When the traffic lights released him he drove into the village, over the bridge where the road forked, up The Rock. Today the verge was loaded with cars, and guests were arriving at a barbecue in one of the elevated gardens as the blond children who he'd seen watching the horse ran to greet them. Jack almost waved, but of course the children hadn't noticed him the first time. He felt invisible, and all the better for it, as he drove to the top of the road.

  He was turning left when he caught sight of Stephen Arrod's house. It looked disused, and somehow darker than the rest of the sunlit landscape. All the curtains were drawn, and the chimney seemed bereft of smoke not that Jack would have welcomed the sight of smoke above the house. He saw the Kops tripping over their hoses as a blazing puppet pranced frantically, and hummed a snatch of the Ritual Fire Dance to dispel the images before they came any closer. Even once they'd vanished he didn't feel relieved until he had parked the van where he'd left it last time and was making for the stile rather than for the downward slope.

  Beyond the stile a path led through a small wood that sounded like a generator. The hum of bees faded as the path emerged into the open and wound upwards over limestone slabs bristling with gorse. A scrap of blue paper pinned to a large fern unfolded its wings and kept fluttering ahead of Jack. The path smelled of grass parched the same colour as the dusty earth. The undergrowth buzzed as if it was primed with miniature alarms, set off and then silenced by his approach. "Try and count the grasshoppers," he said mischievously to Laura.

  When the path climbed to a plateau Jack walked to the edge and let the distance come to meet him. Beyond the insects racing on the motorway, flames hovered like earthbound souls of the industrial landscape. Further out were models of the Liverpool cathedrals, two bridges which he could have placed across the Mersey at Runcorn with a finger and thumb, the brown mass of Warrington fretted with roofs. "Welcome to the Count's domain," Jack murmured.

  "Whose?"

  He hadn't expected either of the family to hear him, but Laura had. The Count of Eleven," he said.

  She sat on the jagged flat edge, Julia grabbing her shoulder to steady her, and dangled her legs. "Who's he when he's at home?"

  "I suppose you could say I am. That's what my name adds up to."

  "How do you reckon that?"

  "J is the tenth letter of the alphabet, A is the first. Add them all up and see what you get."

  She was silent for a time. Julia sat beside her and plaited stalks of grass while Jack scrutinised the horizon, which looked sun bleached Quite soon Laura said "Not eleven."

  For a moment Jack felt dizzy and too close to the edge, as though a support on which he was relying had been snatched away. He stepped back quickly. "Of course it does."

  Laura shook her cropped head. "Seventy-four."

  And what do seven and four add up to?"

  "Dad."

  He wasn't sure whether she was admitting defeat or thought he was cheating. "Laura and Julia add up to it too," he said.

  She seemed to ponder that, then said "We're really thirteen."

  "I certainly hope not," Jack said, feeling it was safest to sit down. "Where do you get that from?"

  "It's what Orchard adds up to."

  She was right, of course. Though he was seated he felt more precarious than before, as if all his calculations had been erroneous. "None of our full names does," he said, "and Orchards doesn't either."

  Julia lay back and sighed. "Does it matter? I'd quite like to get away from numbers for a bit."

  "You can," Jack said, and lay back too, but not for long. When sunlight kept swelling behind his eyelids like an impatient fire he said "Anyone coming for a walk?"

  Julia murmured a sleepy refusal, and Laura said "I like it here."

  He was happy to walk by himself, he wanted to walk off his doubts. He picked his way along the stone edge, gazing down at houses which looked as if he could trample on them. Laura's discovery needn't trouble him, he thought; if anything, it proved he was on the right track, since he had instinctively prevented her from adding up to thirteen. "Trust the count of eleven," he said to himself.

  His walk brought him to a burned patch of the hill. It ran alongside the path for about twenty feet, an irregular plot of blackened earth strewn with ash. Several beer cans crumpled by the fire lay in the midst of it, near a bunch of charred stubs
protruding from the earth, the remains of a bush. He stood and stared at the vandalised patch. When people felt themselves to be meaningless, he thought, they were capable of anything. He imagined how the bush had looked, flaming orange in full daylight with the unassailable conviction of a dream, or blazing in the twilight as if it marked a region between waking and dream, or illuminating the hillside at night, rousing the bushes around it to dance. He gazed until the smell of ash scratched his throat and the stubs began to resemble burned fingers, and then he turned quickly and hurried back.

  He was almost in sight of Julia and Laura when someone hailed him. "Where's the rest of the family today?"

  If he should recognise her, he didn't know from where. She was wearing a purple track suit, a straw hat and sunglasses, and carrying a straight black stick. Her vague familiarity seemed like an omen, but of what? "Over there, I hope," Jack said, pointing ahead.

  She came tramping down through the ferns as Julia and Laura waved to him. When she reached the main path she leaned on her stick and raised her sunglasses like a visor. "Where's the baby?"

  She'd seen him on his way to visit Stephen Arrod. He felt as if she and his family had trapped him between them, isolating him in the relentless sunlight. He had to answer her he mustn't let any of them suspect that he had reason to hesitate but Julia was quicker. "Here she is," she said, hugging Laura.

  The woman cut down a swathe of ferns with her stick and stared hard at Jack. "Not her. The baby in the pram."

  "We haven't had one of those for years," Julia said.

  "He knows what I mean," the woman said, still facing Jack, and demanded of him "Weren't you up here the other day with a baby in a pram?"

  "Would you try and wheel a pram over this terrain?"

  "Someone did," she insisted. "And if it wasn't you—"

  "If it wasn't me it must have been someone else."

  "Someone with less sense," Julia added.

  The woman poked the scythed ferns with her stick and eventually turned to her. "I could have sworn I'd seen your husband with a pram quite recently."