Secret Story

by Ramsey Campbell

  “Kathy. My son thought you’d let him down.” Kathy gave this a moment to make its point before adding “Come in and I’ll get him back.”

  She indicated the front room as she lifted the phone from the little high pine table. Six pairs of rings brought her his voice, but all it said was “Dudley Smith. I can’t talk now. Leave me a message.”

  “Dudley, they’re here. Hurry up and pick this up and come back.”

  The journalist and the photographer sat forward on the sofa with interrogative wicker creaks. “I’m sure he won’t be long,” Kathy said. “Would anyone like a drink?”

  “Love one,” said Tom.

  “That would be wonderful, thanks,” Patricia said.

  Was she a shade too professionally friendly and eager to please? Kathy led them along the hall, only to feel clumsy and big-boned by comparison with Patricia. Tom lingered to poke his face at the framed photographs of sixties Liverpool. “Where’d you buy these? I hope you didn’t pay much.”

  “I took them. I used to think I was creative,” Kathy said. “What will anyone have to drink?”

  “Coldest you’ve got.”

  “I’ll second that,” Patricia said. “And thanks.”

  Kathy planted a bottle of lemonade and three glasses on the table. “So while we’re waiting, tell me about your magazine.”

  “I’m freelance,” Tom said. “Go anywhere I’m told.”

  “Walt who owns it likes giving people a break. That’s why we had the competition.” As Kathy poured a spitting glassful Patricia said “Did your son send that story anywhere else before us, do you know?”

  “He never sent it anywhere.”

  “Except for us, obviously.”

  “Not to you either.” It was bound to come out, Kathy thought, and wasn’t she entitled to a little credit? “He can be shy of pushing himself,” she said. “I sent it for him.”

  “Sounds like your mummy getting you the job, Patricia.”

  Having sipped her drink, Patricia said to Kathy “Your son knew though, did he?”

  “He didn’t. I don’t think he’s convinced how good he is.”

  “We’ll use what you’re telling me if that’s all right with you. Is there anything else he mightn’t say that you think I should know?”

  Kathy thought the question rather too cunning, but said “That’s just one of his stories. There’s more than a dozen upstairs.”

  “Have you read them all? Did you decide that was the best one?”

  “One of the best, but I’m just his mother. Maybe somebody more qualified ought to look at them.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  “If you’d like to stay here I’ll see if I can find them.”

  “Do you write yourself?”

  “I used to a bit. It wasn’t worth keeping. Well, I did keep one story I wrote about Dudley.”

  “I’d love to see that if it’s handy.”

  “I expect it may be,” Kathy said and ran upstairs with an eagerness more straightforward than she had been experiencing. Beyond her unnecessarily double bed she slid aside one hot sallow door of the Nordic wardrobe to grope among her dresses. She retrieved the exercise book with a jangle of hangers and a rustle of fabric, to find that the dull red cover bore the corpse of a moth. She crumbled the insect between finger and thumb and rubbed the silky dust to nothingness as she made for Dudley’s room.

  If possible it was even untidier than the last time she had seen it, as though to challenge her to admit she’d ventured in. Typescripts were piled next to the computer on the desk, and it took her only moments to confirm that they were Dudley’s stories. Since he was no longer bothering to hide them, mustn’t he intend them to be read? She closed his door tight and almost tripped on the edge of a stair in her haste to rejoin the journalist. “Don’t read mine now,” she said. “Save it for when you’ve time.”

  “You’d rather I read his first. I understand.”

  Perhaps in fact she realised Kathy would prefer not to watch her story being read. Dudley had liked her to read it to him when he was little, but had taken refuge in his bedroom to avoid hearing the expanded version with which she’d tried to celebrate his teens. Monty had condemned as far too motherly even the section their son used to like. Once Patricia slipped the exercise book into her scaly silver handbag and began to leaf through the typescripts, Kathy turned to the photographer. “Have you read the story he won with?”

  “I don’t read fiction. It’s just another word for lying. Photography magazines do me.”

  “Will you have read it, Patricia?”

  “I voted for it.” As Kathy started to like her, Patricia said “Are all these set on Merseyside?”

  “I believe they are.”

  “I think someone may be pleased,” Patricia said, but her next question came with the faintest frown. “Are they all about the same killer?”

  “That’s how I took them. I like the way he gets inside the girls.”

  She meant the writing. The photographer grunted with surprise if not with disapproval, as if he’d heard another meaning. She was about to revise her comment when he and Patricia lost interest in her and gazed along the hall, at the sound of a key in a lock. Kathy’s weight pinned the chair down, and she was struggling to turn it when she heard the front door open. “Dudley Smith?” Patricia said and stood up. “I hope you don’t mind, but your mother has been letting us into your secrets.”

  SIX

  As Dudley climbed the slope he heard creatures fleeing through the undergrowth. Perhaps they sensed his baffled rage. They made him think of a question the interviewer could have asked him if she had bothered to turn up. “Mr Smith, what was the first thing you ever killed?” She had to have a face, and so he gave her Colette’s chubby suntanned one, and the job centre as the setting for the interview. She looked as impressed as Mrs Wimbourne and the others that he was about to be published; Lionel had removed his headset to listen, and even Morris had taken time off from his breakdown to be present. “How do you expect your career to develop?” the interviewer ought to ask, and the answer was that Dudley felt capable of writing a bestseller. The girl from the magazine could have scooped his first interview, instead of which she’d let him down.

  The trees that cramped the winding path and poked low branches at his face gave way to shoulder-high ferns and gorse parched dull gold. A twig snapped like a finger beneath his tread, and he yielded to a reminiscent grin before snarling at a thorny bramble tendril he was elbowing aside. Unshaded sunlight fastened on him with an electric buzz of insects, and he felt as if a spotlight had been turned on him. It was about time. If “Night Trains Don’t Take You Home” was going to cause any problems, someone at the magazine would have noticed by now.

  The path widened into an open space where brown turf exposed slabs of sandstone patched another shade of grey by lichen. A hypodermic needle glinted in the shadow of a charred bush he could smell. Gnats whined like a chorus of dentists’ drills, and a huge voice blurred by distance bellowed at him. “What’s ailing you this time, Smith? Still too sickly to join in, or do you think you’re better than your classmates?”

  “I had asthma. I haven’t got it any more,” Dudley was provoked to retort even as he grasped that he’d heard the voice but not its words. There must be a sports day at his old school down in Birkenhead; the amplified voice belonged to Mr Brink, the sports master. “Mr Brink and his awful stink,” Dudley shouted, remembering the stench of sweat and rubber soles that had filled the gymnasium, and seemed to hear the giant voice respond in his head. “Still scribbling, are you, Smith? Still think it’s healthier to sit and make up stories when you should be in the gym or on the field?”

  “Mr Fender said I could write. Maybe you turned him against me. Maybe you told him to say what I could write about,” Dudley said, and controlled himself. “Anyway, I’m not here to talk to you. The first thing I killed, that must have been the caterpillar I ate.”

  Nearly twenty years later the memo
ry was as immediate as the sunlight: tilting his head back to drop the squirming wasp-striped object in his mouth; the tickle of its many feet inside his throat; his efforts not to cough even when he felt it try to twist around and clamber upwards until he gulped it down; its dying struggles in his stomach, where he was sure he’d felt it growing softer before the sensations faded and a faint bitter taste reached his mouth. Colette the interviewer gazed at him in shock and admiration. “Why did you do that?” she breathed.

  “My cousin Bert was meant to as well, only he was sick instead. We used to set each other challenges and that was one of mine. He killed as many things as I did by the time we finished. When he got a bit older he helped them chase the hares into the field for the hounds at Altcar.”

  “Did you ever help?”

  “My parents wouldn’t let me go.” A residue of discontent took Dudley by surprise as he recalled how he’d never seen the hare-coursing—had never witnessed two hounds catch the same hare and, as Bert had delighted in telling him, pull it apart like a squealing bag full of meat and blood. “I killed lots of frogs, though,” he said. “Dozens and dozens.”

  “How did you manage to catch them?”

  “They were stuck together like people.” He remembered the disgust that had turned his mouth sour as he’d realised. He’d peered in repelled fascination at the couples jerking as if they were too feeble to hop, and then he’d trampled some before running for a stick. By the time he’d selected the biggest and heaviest he could wield, he’d been afraid that the frogs might have escaped into the pond, but the grass around it had swarmed with them. Their legs had continued to jerk once he’d smashed their slimy bodies, yet it had taken him years to comprehend that the males might have been unable to stop pumping their slime into the crevices that had trapped them. How could anything so slimy exert such a grip? Even when he’d heard his mother calling him he had pursued his mission around the pond until he could see nothing moving except him, and then he’d tossed the stick into the water and run back to his parents and the picnic. “They didn’t seem to notice they were being killed. They might as well have been toys you wind up. I don’t believe things feel,” he said and wished he were speaking to a real journalist. His mobile couldn’t interrupt him; he felt as if that was why he hadn’t switched it on. If the interviewer and the photographer had bothered to show up, they would have to wait—and then he wondered if they might ask his mother to show them where he wrote. They might see the stories on his desk. They might read them.

  He hissed through his teeth as he ran home. Flies like black lumps of mindlessness bumbled into his face while a sour burned taste gathered in his mouth. No car was parked outside the house. He drew several ragged breaths that felt almost too hot to inhale as he stumped across the road. By the time he reached the front door, all he could think of was a glass of water. He flung the door open as a preamble to reminding his mother that he’d been right about the people from the magazine, only to see a bulky man and a young woman half the size watching him along the hall. “Dudley Smith?” the young woman said. “I hope you don’t mind, but your mother has been letting us into your secrets.”

  Kathy was making an issue of trying to turn to him. The young woman stood up as if to demonstrate how much more petite and in control she was. “Which—” Dudley began to demand and caught sight of a heap of printouts on the table. His words distorted themselves into another shape, and he thought his face did. “Where’d you get those?”

  “Your mother brought them,” the man declared. “She said Patricia could look at them.”

  “I’m sorry we were late,” Patricia said. “We went too far on the train.”

  All that his panicky anger would let Dudley say was “I want a drink.”

  “Better fetch a glass, then,” the photographer took it on himself to tell him.

  “I can get it, Tom,” Kathy said and did.

  “Maybe you can, but you shouldn’t. Just my opinion, of course.”

  Dudley ignored him and watched Kathy pour the lemonade. He leaned against the refrigerator while he swallowed a mouthful and another, and felt sufficiently cooled down to talk. “How much did you read?”

  “Less than I’d have liked,” Patricia said. “I didn’t have time to read any all the way through. Enough to think we might want to use more of them.”

  “Patricia voted for your story,” Kathy said and gave him a surreptitiously pleading look.

  Dudley turned the printouts face down on the table as he sat opposite the journalist. “All right, I don’t mind being interviewed now.”

  Tom released a wordless noise, which Patricia made it clear she was disregarding. “Do you mind if I tape this?” she asked Dudley.

  “I wouldn’t have minded,” Kathy said.

  The remark with which Patricia had greeted his arrival flared up in his head. “What have you been saying?”

  “That you don’t believe in your achievement,” Patricia told him.

  He kept his stare on his mother. “That’s all you said.”

  “It’s your interview, Dudley. You should be the one to talk.”

  “Go on then, Patricia. Ask about me.”

  She depressed two buttons on the dinky tape recorder with a single fingertip. “What made you start writing?”

  “My father.” He thought that was the safest answer. “He wrote poems,” he said. “Used to read them like a lot of local poets do. Still does. I saw a poster he was on the other week.”

  “You could have gone to hear him if you wanted,” Kathy said. “I wouldn’t have minded.”

  “What’s his name?” Patricia waited to ask.

  “Monty Smith,” Kathy said at once.

  “He used to read to me a lot. That must be what made me want to write.”

  “Just your father?”

  “Her as well.”

  “That isn’t what you call your mother,” Tom objected, “her.”

  “No, I call her Kathy when I call her.”

  “She’s helped you too, I expect,” Patricia intervened.

  “She kept saying I should keep on writing. And a master at school did.”

  “Maybe I could talk to him.”

  “No.”

  “He turned against Dudley in the end, you see,” Kathy said.

  “One of Dudley’s stories shocked him because it was so real. It shocked me too, but that’s not bad, is it? Not bad for a fifteen-year-old. It showed how imaginative he was even then. All he had to go on were the news reports about a murder.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place.”

  “Now, Tom, let me do the interviewing.” To Dudley, Patricia said “Do you remember when you became interested in crime?”

  He felt as if everyone in the room was eager to scrutinise his answer. “Lots of people are,” he protested. “It’s normal.”

  “Maybe, but if you write without trying to be published you have to find it satisfying all by itself.”

  He didn’t have to respond, but then he saw how he could deal with it. “I know when I started being interested,” he said to Kathy. “When you let me watch Eamonn’s videos.”

  His mother risked a smile. “They weren’t supposed to watch them at their age, but I knew he could tell the difference between fiction and real life. His friend’s parents owned a video library.”

  “Eamonn watched the films as well, and he ended up working for the government like us. Eamonn Moore. He’s in the tax office. His parents ran Moore and Moore Video.”

  “So where do you find your inspiration?” Patricia said.

  “You started with real murders, didn’t you?” Kathy said.

  Dudley struggled to produce an expression that felt like a grin. “Did I?”

  “I’m sorry to keep bringing it up, but the story Mr Fender didn’t like was about a real murderer and the things he did. Mr Fender said it was too real, as if a story could be.”

  �
��Do you still have it?” Patricia said.

  “Why would I? It was only a school thing.”

  “You could have given it to me,” Kathy said wistfully. “So you didn’t just destroy the story I wanted you to send somewhere.”

  “What was that about?” Patricia asked them both.

  “Nothing but me being a teenager. It was awful.”

  “I was never sure if it was meant to be you,” Kathy said. “Were you really so lonely? Did you honestly think girls couldn’t see how much there was to you? There wasn’t actually a girl who laughed at you when you went to kiss her, was there?”

  “It was a story like all my stories.” That didn’t quite rid him of it, and so he demanded “When are we doing the photograph?”

  “We can now if you’d like a break from being questioned.”

  The photographer unzipped his bag and cocked his head at Kathy. “Can I borrow a knife? The biggest you’ve got,” he said and passed Dudley the carving knife she gave him. “Come at me with this. Try and look dangerous.”

  Dudley was resisting temptation when Kathy said “Is that necessary? He’s a writer, not a murderer.”

  As Dudley dropped the knife on the table Patricia said “How about where you write?”

  “Let me just run and tidy up a bit,” Kathy intervened. “I shouldn’t be long.”

  “You’ve messed about in my room enough. You can’t go in there any more.”

  As the photographer narrowed his eyes Patricia said “Maybe I’ve got a solution.”

  “I do hope so,” Dudley’s mother said in more words than he would have used.

  Patricia took a phone from her handbag and thumbed a stored number. “Walt? Patricia . . . Fine so far, but I was wondering about the photo . . . I thought we could wait till he meets Vincent, if Tom doesn’t mind.”

  “Tom won’t have to,” the photographer said, zipping his bag shut.

  “He is. I’ll put him on.”

  Dudley was eager to see Tom being reprimanded for his comment, and was thrown when Patricia handed him the mobile. It carried the warmth of her cheek and the faintest scent of soap. He held it away from his face to say “Hello?” and more forcefully “This is Dudley Smith.”