The Count of Eleven

by Ramsey Campbell

  "What do you mean?"

  "What should she mean? It was a joke."

  "I know, love," he said quickly to Laura. "I didn't quite hear what you said at first. That's why you shouldn't speak with anything in your mouth."

  Laura looked as if she felt that comment deserved a retort, but she only said "I just meant you like numbers."

  "Some more than others."

  He thought she was going to ask which were which. Instead she looked pensive. "Dad?"

  "Address me."

  "What's the power of thirteen?"

  "Something multiplied by itself thirteen times."

  "Like that letter."

  "Which was that, now?"

  "That silly letter you sent thirteen copies of to people."

  "I sent The waiter removed their used plates, and Jack had to make himself breathe. As the man moved away Jack tried to sound amused. "You said I sent&mdash"

  "You're as silly as that letter. I meant you were supposed to, not that you did. Have you got a piece of paper?"

  "What for?"

  "I want to work something out."

  "I may have." Jack groped in his pocket and touched a crumpled piece of paper. "This is the letter you're talking about, isn't it?" he would have had to say if he had given it to her. "I haven't any," he told her. "Can't you do it in your head?"

  She gazed at the arched ceiling and moved her lips silently as the waiter brought their meals. "Don't let it get cold," Julia said to her after a minute or so.

  "Right, Dad. How many people are there in the world?"

  "I haven't counted lately. A good few."

  "If you sent thirteen people a letter, and each of them had to send it to another thirteen people, and then those hundred and sixty-nine all had to, and those She closed her eyes for a couple of seconds. those two thousand one hundred and ninety-seven did, and on and on like that, how long would it be before all the people in the world were used up?"

  "Beats me."

  "More than thirteen times all that?"

  "It would have to be."

  "Bet it wouldn't be much more."

  "I don't know, and I'm not going to try and work it out when we're supposed to be on holiday. Besides," Jack said with a mixture of relief and triumph, "not everyone does what the letter tells them."

  "How do you know?"

  "Are you saying I did?" the Count said.

  "No need to speak to her like that, Jack, just because she's given you a problem."

  "You're right," he said, and smiled at Laura until she was convinced he meant the smile. "You win."

  What she'd pointed out was irrelevant now after the fact, he told himself, and tried to put it out of his mind as he finished his meal. Afterwards they walked down the far side of the hill to a lake surrounded by young tourists dining at tables beneath awnings. A path led the Orchards above the lake, which was full of inverted luminous hotels, and down to a children's playground where they all had a swing in the dark. Another street took them over the hill again, past shops that seemed to have been abandoned half-built among their thriving neighbours, and eventually the Orchards came back to the road to the hotel. In the cemetery flames in jars stood on graves; stars flickered above the hushed almost invisible sea. "I'm beginning to wish we could never go home," Julia said.

  "Have you had enough of where we're living?" Jack said.

  "I don't mean that. I just mean I love it here." She was silent while they watched a bat like a scrap of the night flutter out of a cypress opposite the graveyard. "When we do go home," she said, "maybe we need to think of making a few sacrifices so that we can move."

  "I've made several," the Count wanted to respond. "Let's see what we all can think of," said Jack.

  "I do want to go home," Julia declared as if he'd implied the reverse. "Though I don't mind telling you, when the woman by me on the plane asked where I was from I was ashamed to say, seeing she was reading the paper."

  "What difference did that make?"

  "Of course, you didn't see it. You were busy catching up on your shuteye. Just a report of what that Mersey maniac did to a mother and her little boy," she said. "I didn't want to admit I came from anywhere that could produce such a monster."

  FORTY-SIX

  Thank God, it had all been a dream except for their being in Crete. At the end of the holiday Jack would reopen Fine Films while Julia went back to Rankin's. The credit card hadn't been stolen, and Jack had never had to confront the bank manager; but what had he forgotten which was threatening to disturb his sleep? Of course: he needed to insure Fine Films in case there was a fire, or because once it was insured there would be, providing them with cash to help them move house and giving him an excuse to find a better job. Though that didn't quite make sense, surely he needn't ponder it now; if he didn't put it out of his head it was liable to spoil the holiday. But he'd forgotten something else, which felt like an inexorable slow explosion in his brain, and it did worse than mar the holiday it wakened him.

  He was lying alone in thick sweaty darkness, and held down on the bed by a sodden sheet. For a moment he thought he had been incarcerated in a Greek asylum, then he realised he was in the hotel room. He could hear Julia's breathing across the room. There wasn't space for the two of them to sleep together on either of the beds, but he felt as though she was trying to stay away from him. If she found out who he was she would, and he would be the last to blame her. He only wished he could dissociate himself.

  He hadn't killed Janys Day's child. That much he'd learned from Julia. A neighbour had reached the child's room with a ladder and smashed the window and brought the child out safe before the fire had penetrated the room. Jack imagined flames swarming up the cot, trapping the toddler in a cage of fire, and tried to writhe away from himself. Even the thought of the neighbour carrying the toddler, no doubt struggling and screaming in her arms, down the ladder above the fire brought him close to fainting. He hadn't killed the child, but he might have. He had killed five people, and Julia was right to loathe him.

  He couldn't reassure himself that she didn't know who she was loathing; that only made him feel more outcast. He couldn't tell himself that he'd killed in order to protect her and Laura; he was no longer certain that he'd needed to. In any case, he had no right to hold her and Laura responsible. He was.

  Acknowledging that didn't help either. It seemed as if all he could do was wait to be found out, and he didn't think he could bear to wait for very long. You could get used to anything, he reflected, and crammed the sheet into his mouth to stifle a cry of disgust at himself. "Who?" Julia mumbled, then turned over with a sigh, and Jack began to shiver from trying to lie absolutely still until he was certain she was asleep.

  Judging by last night, now that he'd awakened he could look forward to hours of wakefulness. The charred darkness felt as if it was as much within him as outside him. When he opened his eyes he saw vague smoky lights, when he closed them his eyes felt almost too raw to suffer the weight of their lids. Whenever exhaustion seemed about to let him doze, one or other of the thoughts he'd already had flared up again in his skull. He could hardly believe that he slept, but at one point he found the room had grown perceptibly less dark without his noticing, and then sunlight was streaming through the windows and Julia had left a kiss on his forehead. "Wake up or we'll miss the coach for Knossos," she called from the bathroom.

  When he heard the bathroom shower reduced to a drizzle he pushed himself off the bed. He felt as though the night had left a sooty residue on his eyeballs. He was trying to grasp an impression that there was something else he should remember, something crucial. He stood under the shower, hoping that the water might rouse his thoughts, but he'd had no success by the time he felt obliged to go to Julia for fear that she might wonder why he was delaying. He dressed, trying not to avoid meeting her eyes, and collected Laura on the way to breakfast. Appearances had to be maintained, he heard one of his voices remark.

  The breakfast room above the bar was already al
most full. There were tablefuls of tanned young Germans, a blind Norwegian and her female companion, the couple from Birmingham. Jack loaded his plate with bread rolls and feta cheese and cold meat and bade the Birmingham couple good morning, and received stares and mumbles in response. They had every reason to be dubious of him. Might one or both of them be police? He almost welcomed the idea, except that the prospect of being arrested in front of Julia and Laura, or even of their learning about him, was unbearable. "Aren't you hungry, Dad?" Laura said, and he made himself pick at the food on his plate.

  On the way into town the sun felt like a light in an interrogation room, the sea appeared to be glittering a relentless incomprehensible message at him. The coach would meet the Orchards at a telephone kiosk on the near edge of town. Jack found his attention drawn to the phone, and then he could hardly speak but had to. "I'm just going round the corner," he managed to say in his ordinary voice.

  "So long as it isn't round the bend," Julia said.

  "Don't be long, Dad. The bus might come."

  Once they were out of sight he began to snarl through his teeth like a ventriloquist "You clown, you clown, you clown." A fisherman on his way up from the harbour with a pole full of squid glanced reprovingly at him, but Jack was nearly blinded by dismay. The names of his victims spelled out his name; the police had only to decode the numbers of the pages in the phone directory. "You clown," he snarled, he didn't know how loud.

  But could the names of the people he hadn't harmed be used to trace him? Since the Count hadn't made his later visits in alphabetical order, could they be seen to spell Jack's name? He closed his eyes and faced the sun while he recalled the order of the names. Burning figures pranced in his head. He was safe after all, he was invisible; the Count had taken care of him. He dodged into a store and grabbed a litre of water from among the bottles of retsina and Metaxa, and almost dashed out without paying when he heard the coach. For a moment he thought it was leaving without him. One panic felt much like another just now, yet the notion of being left behind by Julia and Laura seemed momentarily welcome. But the coach was drawing up beside the telephone kiosk. "Here's Dad now," Laura said as if she had been close to panic.

  The coach laboured up the slope above the town, past a donkey lying down for a rest, and turned towards Heraklion. Solitary churches gleamed white on the mountains, then the road was threaded through towns which appeared still to be under construction in order to house the throngs of tourists. The veering of the coach had put the burning figures out of Jack's head, but his brain felt stuffed with ash. He was sitting in front of Laura and her mother, and every so often he gave in to a compulsion to turn and reassure himself that they hadn't deserted him.

  The coach climbed through Heraklion to the site of the palace of Minos. The guide led the coach load of passengers through the ruins, past parties which were being advised in German and French and Dutch. Here on the hill surrounded by olive groves and cypresses were fragments of great porches supported by red pillars, giant horns carved on ancient pavements, exposed subterranean rooms full of jars larger than a man, a stone throne guarded by mythical animals, even a queen's privy. Finally the guide brought her party to the road along which Minoan royalty would walk between their palaces. Jack gazed along the path of stone slabs outlined by moss and saw where it was crossed by a mirage of a stream, heat transformed into water. "We didn't see where the Minotaur lived," Laura said wistfully.

  He could show her a labyrinth, he thought. It was himself. He was the monster in it too, and he'd trapped himself at the centre with no way out. "There's no magic here, only history," he opened his mouth to say, but a thought silenced him.

  Perhaps there was magic after all, because he had grasped what he'd been trying to remember. The world seemed to brighten as if a fire had been lit, and he felt as though an oracle had helped him. He could still protect the family, and he had to. He was all at once certain that one or more of those who'd claimed to have sent the letters, or had promised to do so, had lied to him.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  On the morning of their last full day in Crete Jack said "Have we done everything you wanted to do?"

  "We have now," Julia said.

  "Everything," said Laura.

  They were at Lato, a ruined city about three miles' walk from the main road. On one side of the hill ancient altars faced a valley below a jagged peak, on the other the white streets led below a second peak towards Aghios Nikolaos, piled in the distance against the pale sea. Apart from a few goats and a shy snake and a chorus of insects, the Orchards had the ruins to themselves. Laura kept wondering aloud whether any of the thick stones which made up the pavements and the remains of the houses and workshops and shops were really three thousand years old, until Julia told her gently not to bother so much about numbers. Jack stood by the altars and gazed at the greenery which overgrew the crags and let the growing heat catch up with him, and eventually Julia called "Penny for them."

  "They're worth a lot more," he said, smiling easily at her.

  "Shall we head for humanity before it gets too hot?"

  "If you've seen all you wanted to see."

  "You too, Jack."

  "Oh, I've got what I wanted out of the trip," he said, resting his hand for a few seconds on the slab of the altar. Its warmth felt like a secret it was sharing with him. He slithered down the path, dislodging a few pebbles that rattled after him, and took Julia and Laura by the hand as they returned to the dirt road.

  An old woman in black was selling her embroidery near a shrine at the edge of the ruins, and later the Orchards encountered a couple of jeeps bound for Lato, but otherwise the road was deserted. It wandered downhill between groves and fields where the only sign of cultivation was the occasional abandoned farming implement. After half an hour of trudging Jack felt as though he had been walking for ever while the sun rode his back, yet the experience was peaceful because his outlook was. When the Orchards halted for a mouthful each of bottled water, Laura said "What did you like best?"

  "Sailing to Santorini," Julia said.

  "You mean when we first saw it and we thought all the houses on the top of the island were snow?"

  "And having to ride up on donkeys because the streets were so steep."

  "And when they let us dive off the ship on the way back and we swam over the drowned city."

  "Was that your favourite, Laura?"

  "No, the Bounty beach."

  "Even though it took us half the day to get there and there weren't any Bounty bars at the beach shop and they'd had to hang coconuts on the palm trees when they were filming the advert?"

  "Yes, because the sand was so white and we swam out to that little island. What was your favourite, Dad?"

  "All of it. Being with you two. You don't realise how much you can fit into thirteen days until you have to."

  "At the top Mum said not to worry so much about numbers."

  "I'm not worried," he said, feeling their hands in his, Julia's rougher than it had been when they'd first held hands but still essentially soft, Laura's almost as big as Julia's now and both of them slim though, he reflected, anything but frail. "Come on or we'll miss the next bus," he said, worried after all. "We mustn't have you two getting sunstroke on our last day."

  When at last they reached the end of the rubbly path the bus was pulling away from the stop, but sighed to a halt when the driver saw them despairing. The conductor gave Laura the tickets once she'd treated him to her six words of Greek, and then an old woman who was taking a basketful of produce into town engaged her in a conversation which soon turned into smiles and gestures, and gave her a handful of olives which Laura didn't like to refuse. Jack ate most of them and held the stones in his fist, having counted them: "Florist, plumbress, psychic, dressmaker, rich girl." Their bitter taste lingered in his mouth all the way to the bus station by the harbour.

  The driver inserted the bus into the rank of vehicles with, it seemed, hardly an inch to spare. As the Orchards climbed down fro
m it an Orthodox priest strode by, the hem of his robe flapping. Jack could smell fish, the sea, the fumes of the bus, the spicy meat of a kebab, the faintest hint of Julia's body lotion. They walked away from the roaring of engines and the distorted shout that announced the destinations of the buses, and Jack heard the cries of gulls seesawing above the wake of a fisherman's boat. "Shall we come here next year?" Laura said.

  "Let's make the most of now for now," Jack told her. He felt ambushed by unhappiness until she said "I'm going to look in the jewellery shop' and ran ahead.

  Julia watched her long tanned legs moving gracefully, her body slim in shorts and a T-shirt, her red hair no longer so cropped. "She's growing up."

  "We all are."

  "I'm not so sure about you," Julia said, and became thoughtful. "I wish you could have seen her when we found the burglar in the house. She ran straight at him as he came out of our room before I could stop her. I don't think he knew what hit him."

  "I can imagine."

  She put one arm around Jack's shoulders and kissed him, gazing into his eyes. "I'm glad you managed to unwind. I didn't know what was wrong with you the first couple of days we were here."

  "Just getting used to the heat and trying to catch up on my sleep."

  "I think it's turned out to be our best holiday ever."

  "I think you're right," Jack said, walking ahead of her for a few steps so that she couldn't read his face. "Let's go back to the hotel and have lunch in the shade," he said, catching her and Laura by the hand.

  The family sat under the awning of the taverna beside the hotel. A man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat was paddling a plastic boat hired from the next beach, and a group of new arrivals were braving the height of the sun on recliners below the hotel. A breeze set the waves glittering and brightened Julia's and Laura's eyes, touched up their freckles, twined and untwined Julia's hair over her shoulders. The waiter brought swordfish and retsina, and Jack wanted the meal to last for ever. All too soon Julia finished her brandy and coffee and said "I'm going up for a shower."