The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  He appeared at her side, having finished empty handed. Following her gaze, he looked out to sea and said, as though speaking her thoughts, “The sea’s so . . . big, isn’t it?” “Mmm,” she agreed. I’ll jump into the waves, she thought, I’ll jump. Just watch me.

  “I dare say Suzie would prefer to go off with someone of her own age,” her mother had suggested over dinner a couple of weeks ago, more to dampen her father’s irritating enthusiasm for the holiday Suzie had felt, than for her sake. Instantly, it had in any case seemed to be the last thing she wanted. On her mother’s lips “someone of her own age” sounded like a member of some despised, minority group; the phrase filled her with contempt. “I don’t,” she’d protested, with none of the violence that had risen up in her at the time. I won’t, she’d thought. No one had asked her anyway.

  “Having fun?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking up from the waves. Incredibly, this reply seemed to satisfy her father. Surely he could see that there was nothing for her here. Aside from a few gangs of pimply, paisley-clad youths, everyone here was either very old or mentally handicapped. It was worse than home. Couldn’t he see that?

  “The thing about the seaside – ” her father began as they left the pier. She imagined that Paul Rees had ended up here on holiday too, that he would walk out of a shop now and see her, the incredible surprise forcing words from their mouths: “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it . . .” “Paul! Fancy – ” “Suzie. I can’t –”

  “Suzie!” She realised that her father had stopped, turning to look at something across the road.

  It was a building that had caught her father’s attention, and she wasn’t surprised: painted scarlet and burnt orange, it glared even in the absence of sunshine. It was sandwiched between an arcade and a cafe. Gold pillars announced the entrance, supporting a tasselled canopy, along the front of which was written, yellow on black: WAX MUSEUM.

  “Looks interesting, doesn’t it?” Suzie didn’t contradict her father; it seemed cruel to disappoint the childish excitement in his eyes. Not for the first time she had a dreamy sensation of unfamiliarity with this silly man. Why, out of all the possibilities, was he her father?

  “Come on,” he said, stepping out into the wide, quiet road, one of his hands moving to take hers, then falling back; some concessions, after all, had to be made to the fact that she was a growing girl. She followed him, but as the gaudy building approached so her resolve grew. She would not enter, even if it meant screaming, hurling obscenities or throwing up to indicate, finally, that she was sick of all this. Boards leaning against the flaking gold of the pillars displayed clumsy black-and-white caricatures of Rambo, Frankenstein’s monster, and Kylie and Jason. “Your favourite,” her father said, pointing at these last, “Eh?” Didn’t he understand that they were a joke to her, and to anyone with a brain? Didn’t he? “I don’t want to go in,” she said, having to rush the words in order to halt her father’s quick progress.

  He stopped dead, and in the moment before he turned to face her, she felt an icy dread. But his greying head turned to reveal a smiling mouth and eyes which held only faint concern, as at the amusing but obstructive antics of a family pet. “Come on, Suzie. It’ll be fun. Let your hair down a bit.” Jesus, she hated him. With his wet brown eyes and large rounded nose, he looked just like some soppy animal, one of the “cute” figurines Mum bought for the mantelpiece. His smile held no fear of rejection or dislike. The upper teeth protruded from it, unafraid of exposure, stupidly trusting.

  “I just need some air,” she said, and was aware, even as she spoke, of how absurd it sounded. She’d already had plenty of air. It had been continually shoved in her face by the wind on the pier, more than enough of it. No wonder her father smiled. Surprisingly though, he didn’t press the point and instead relented, looking regretful but oddly determined. “I won’t be long,” he promised, and she felt a quick stab of resentment at the ease with which he abandoned her. “I don’t know, probably about . . . twenty minutes?”

  “I’ll hang around out here.”

  He went inside without further hesitation, and she heard him greeting whoever was on the door with conversation-inducing enthusiasm. She had to move. Already, a white-haired old lady was frowning at her as though she had no right to be there, and no right not to know what she wanted to do in a place where there was so much, and all of it so clearly signposted. So she walked, looking around for something to aim for.

  The funfair’s bright towers pointed to the clouds, where seagulls soared, shrieking. At the edge of an arcade a metal grab hovered over the soft bodies of expressionless teddy bears, caged in clear plastic. Next to them, a plastic chicken clucked mechanically over its collection of red and yellow eggs.

  A shop displayed racks of postcards, beach balls, a flat metal ice cream cone. Behind the counter stood a bored young man whose tan had presumably come from somewhere else.

  She could, she supposed, buy an ice cream. And she might tell the young man that he looked bored, and he would smile, his hard, cold expression softening instantly, – but did she want an ice cream? Not really.

  She ended up in an arcade, where at least she was not required to feign enjoyment. The other clients – who were few, all male and all unhandsome – were notably undemonstrative, as though afraid of giving something away to the machines they faced. The room was full of bleeps and synthetic voices and silly loops and twiddles of noise. She won ten pence, won forty pence, lost it again, and saw, looking at her watch, that her twenty minutes were up.

  He wasn’t there.

  A badly dressed, and in any case ugly, family stood looking at the boards leaning against the cracked-gold pillars, until the mother, giving a curious little moan of boredom and despair, walked off, the others following, leaving only an empty crisp packet on the pavement where her father should have been. She was annoyed with him, although he hadn’t been definite about the time, could hardly have been expected to be, given that he didn’t know what awaited him inside.

  She went to wait by the entrance, but away from the gaze of whoever lurked inside. She stared at Kylie and Jason, their oversized heads pushed together, hearts and musical notes flying up from the collision, and felt, under the gaze of passers-by, as if she was pretending to wait for someone.

  Five minutes passed and she crossed the road. White foam collapsed, hissing, against the stones. On the beach, a lone figure in an anorak was walking a dog called – as far as she could tell from the walker’s muffled shouts – Walter. She stared out at a distant ship, but the real objects of her attention, frequently consulted, were her watch and the waxworks entrance, which remained deserted through ten minutes, fifteen.

  She waited, as a Jason Donovan song played itself, annoyingly, over and over again in her head. Her father’s promised twenty minutes grew even more distant, part of a cosy, predictable world where appointments were kept and things settled into place, the world seen through the bored eyes of passing holidaymakers, but lost to her now. Every tiny shift of the second hand on her watch moved her further into new, uncertain territory. There was nothing she could do to stop it. Twenty minutes passed.

  Finally, something seemed to gather itself together inside her, bringing everything into focus; she saw what she had to do.

  “Excuse me.”

  The booth looked too cramped for the tall, skinny body of the young man who looked up at her, eyes startled behind round glasses. His short hair, though fashionably cut, seemed, in exposing his large ears and the back of his neck, only to emphasise his vulnerability. Student, she thought with satisfaction.

  “My Dad came in here three-quarters of an hour ago. He hasn’t come out yet. I don’t suppose you’ve seen him?”

  He blushed immediately, pleasing her. “Three-quarters . . . yes I think I remember him,” he said, as though the crowds had been too thick for him easily to recall individuals. “Well,” he concluded tentatively, “I haven’t seen him emerge, but when he does, he has to come ou
t here.”

  “But he hasn’t,” she pointed out, with a smile.

  “No.” His gaze dropped to the paperback in his hands, darted to the curtains beyond the turnstile, whose folds concealed the interior.

  “I mean, is there a lot to see in there?”

  Staring into the purple folds, he considered. “Not really,” he said, finally.

  His utter uselessness and obvious discomfort struck her as something almost miraculous. At the same time, however, she found that she could be properly annoyed. She sighed loudly. “I mean,” she said, her tone implying that she shouldn’t be the one to suggest this, that it wasn’t his place, “something might have happened, mightn’t it?”

  At least he didn’t ask her to specify. He merely nodded, slowly, almost sadly, eyes still on the curtain.

  “I could go and look, if you let me in.”

  “No.” As if the suggestion had gone beyond the bounds of decency, he was suddenly, sharply certain. “No, I’ll – I’ll come with you. It’s just that I’m the only one here at the moment.” He looked around the lobby, confirming his own statement, seeing only her and a few movie posters and stills. She was beginning to wonder if his vagueness was not so much indecision as eccentricity, weirdness. “Oh well,” he concluded with an abrupt, lopsided smile, “We weren’t exactly throbbing with life anyway.”

  He locked the till and, opening a door at the side, emerged from the booth stiffly, awkward as something newborn. She thought momentarily of a baby giraffe in a wildlife programme, learning to stand on its long, spindly legs. But already he seemed to be growing in confidence, whistling with unashamed, even perverse, tunelessness as, with a drawn-out grating noise, he dragged the big, metal OPEN sign into the entranceway. Flipping it over to indicate closure, he turned to Suzie, who now recognised the song he was trying to whistle. It was “Too Many Broken Hearts”, the same one that had been going through her own head out on the front: well no doubt an arcade or a car radio had been playing it, setting it off in both their minds. There’s too many broken hearts in the world, sang her head once more as the student, silent now, came towards her.

  A coin from the back pocket of his jeans let her through the turnstile and, retrieved, allowed him to follow. She pushed the curtain, whose rich plum colour belied the thinness of the material, aside.

  MINGLE WITH THE STARS, advised a sign hanging from the ceiling. The stiff, smiling stars were set up as partygoers, holding glasses, dancing. The illusion was somewhat modified by the fact that they were arranged, facing outwards, along a central walkway and by the plaques at their feet which identified them. “Do you see him?” asked the concerned voice of the young man behind her. She said nothing. The walkway was clearly deserted.

  Naturally, she found herself glancing at the figures as she passed them. They were a sorry bunch; it was hard to imagine mingling with any of them. An overdressed tailor’s dummy named Joan Collins held a delicate champagne glass in one clumsy, congealed fist. A prominent page three girl grinned and thrust her scantily-clad breasts forward – a definite breach of etiquette at most parties, Suzie would have thought, particularly when the objects on display were so patently false. Jason too was there, limbs contorted in what was presumably intended to look like dancing, but where was Kylie? She’d always known that their romance was a fabrication.

  Orange flesh was cracked and pockmarked; the whites of painted eyes had overflowed, drying on the lids. She doubted whether even her father would have been able to maintain his enthusiasm in the face of this. What could have kept him so long? Of course he must have left early, overlooked by the dick in the booth, buried in his book. He must have gone to look for her, got lost, waited for her now outside. Dull but true.

  The student had overtaken her, walking briskly; anxious, no doubt that she not have time to get a good free eyeful. As if she wanted it! He had to duck his head in order to pass through the next doorway, which was flanked by self-explanatory double act Little and Large, their size exaggerated in both cases to the point of grotesquerie. Passing after him between the leering, bloated gargoyle and the starved, grimacing wretch Suzie ended up in a small room with metallic grey walls. THE TOUGH GUYS was written in huge black capitals on one wall. Beneath this a row of figures used guns and fists to maintain threatening postures, none of them convincing.

  Her father was nowhere to be seen, but instead of moving quickly on to the next section the young man had stopped and was on his knees in front of Clint Eastwood, searching for something on the grubby floor. Stopping just inside the room, she saw him seize on what might have been a small, dead animal. Muttering, he stood, lifting whatever he’d found up to Eastwood’s twisted mouth. It was, she realised as he attempted to stick it to the dummy’s upper lip, a thin moustache which seemed to resist the young man’s attempts to place it, wriggling out of his grasp to slip back onto the floor.

  She sniggered as he bent down again to retrieve it, committed now to this absurd task simply because she was watching. His face reddened, at the mercy of her concentrated gaze. Satisfied, she smiled and turned her attention to the dummies. Sylvester Stallone’s bulky torso was naked apart from a belt of cartridges, but the absence of nipples robbed it of conviction. Charles Bronson stared determinedly ahead, attempting to command respect despite his flaws, not the least of which was an incongruous nose, too large, too round.

  “Found him?”

  Startled, she turned to see the young man upright again, and wearing a smile which looked forced. “Who?” she asked, and at the same time the young man said: “You must have a nose for this kind of thing.” For a moment she stared at him in complete confusion. Then she looked back at Bronson, at that ridiculous nose, and she saw that it was very like her father’s. “Oh,” she said. One brief syllable jumped from the young man’s lips: laughter, she supposed. Just as abruptly, he turned and walked off.

  If the nose was made of something soft like putty he might have shaped it into that likeness before she got into the room. Mightn’t he? But he hadn’t had time, it looked too solid . . . She had no desire to touch it, to find out. Coincidence, obviously.

  But she was left with the uncomfortable feeling of having missed the joke.

  She hurried after the student, suddenly afraid that Bronson’s revolver would swing towards her, a hidden speaker blasting out the noise of gunshots. Cheap shocks wouldn’t be outside the repertoire of a place like this. Above an arched doorway was written, in Gothic lettering, THE WORLD OF HISTORY. She entered a long room, one of whose pale blue walls displayed a sketchy map of the world, or a pattern based on that general idea. The student stood in the middle of the deserted walkway. He shrugged, an insincere apology for her father’s continued absence. “Popular place, this,” she said, wanting to undermine him. Immediately, she wished that she hadn’t spoken. The room seemed to magnify her words; distorting them, yet pinpointing the uncertainty that shivered behind them.

  Nevertheless, they found their target. The young man blushed as though he had been personally insulted. “Well we’re meant to be looking for your father,” he said quickly, not looking at her. “I think.”

  The bemused pleasure of her unexpected success barely had time to register. The blush faded, the bespectacled eyes locked onto something, no longer simply avoiding her.

  “Now where could he be?” the young man pondered, a frown troubling his pale forehead. He was looking at Hitler. “Maybe he knows.”

  Suzie was forced to recognise that his humour, if this was what it was, had merely gone underground, not disappeared. Hitler, for his part, played dumb: his expression suggested a simper, a parody of innocence. The young man compressed his lips in mimicry of this, then turned to the Queen Mother. He returned the smile that bared her plastic teeth and Suzie thought: perhaps the joke’s on the dummies and not me.

  In spite of herself, she was relieved. The young man smiled at her, winked, and strode onward. His gait was stiff, like a forced, jokey march. Prick, she mouthed at his back, but
she followed, at ease. She’d be half-mad too if she was stuck here all day. The figures regarded them easily, as though finding themselves unworthy of this parade. Henry VIII looked like an insecure fat girl, cowering inside tinsel-edged robes. Gandhi was a skinny, wide-eyed child. Only the Queen Mother looked sure of herself, and that was down to her striking brown eyes.

  Not that, in real life, she had brown eyes (did she?) so no wonder they were striking. Effortlessly defeating the pink she was wearing, they seized all the attention for themselves. They had depth, clarity, and a gleam; like oases in the desert of that stilted face, they alone managed to convince.

  “Seen something you like?”

  The student’s voice made her immediately unable to understand why she had stopped to stare. She couldn’t think of an excuse or a reply to his ironic question, she could only see herself from his mocking point of view: she was acting like a kid who thinks she’s caught up in some thrilling mystery, set up just for her to unravel. All she could do was hurry over to him with a stupid smile, telling herself that the eyes were glass, that was all, just glass. That was why they had seemed so real in comparison to the others, mostly painted-on. If it hadn’t been for that first, stupid coincidence she wouldn’t have been taken in like that . . . The student raised his eyebrows, then turned and disappeared into the next room. The bright blue walls and the vague world map slid away as she followed, leaving her in darkness.

  For a moment all she could see were those two brown eyes, superimposed on the blackness in front of her. They were lingering because they wanted her to recognise them but she couldn’t, wouldn’t. They were nothing but glass.

  Seen something you like? Had the question been addressed to her or to the dummy, she wondered, trying to avoid the eyes, which were accusing, pleading. Fading . . . It became clear that she was in a corridor. Ahead of her the young man’s pale shirt glided around a corner, drawing her on.

  The corridor wound about in a deliberately baffling manner, occasionally shoving a smooth, clammy wall in front of her, thrusting her one way or the other; she saw herself trapped in a gloomy kind of pinball. Poorly lit tableaux were stationed at intervals on either side of the passage. A pirate clutched a cutlass, Shakespeare a quill pen – although the look of comic despair on the latter’s face suggested that the feather might as well be all that he’d managed to retain of a fleeing pet, a budgerigar perhaps.