Secret Story

by Ramsey Campbell

  “In that case start your break now and speak to them.” Once he was facing her again Mrs Wimbourne said “And make sure you let them know we may not be giving permission for your story to be published.”

  “You won’t want me talking in front of the public,” he said as two young mothers wheeled toddlers into the office, but answered the phone on the way to the door for fear the caller might ring off. “Dudley Smith the author.”

  “Hey, Dudley. Up to much?”

  “Nothing that can’t wait for our magazine, Walt,” he said and closed his eyes as he turned his face up to the sunlight. “What do you need me for now?”

  “Let’s see. There’s some good news and—well, I know we’re going to be able to work out the rest.”

  As Dudley opened his eyes he thought the crowd was surging towards him, but they were avoiding a magazine seller and her invitation to help the homeless. “What is it?” he demanded.

  “The good news is your father’s agreed to take over from Shell.”

  For a sunless instant Dudley saw her face bobbing up at him from inky water. “How can he?” Dudley said, as much to fend off the glimpse as to know. “What’s he taking?”

  “He’ll be writing a column for us. Poetry, humour, comment, whatever fires him up. It won’t be Shell, but I’m betting it may be just as good along her lines. You know how much he admired her.”

  Dudley couldn’t grasp how the prospect of working alongside his father made him feel. Monty’s reappearance still struck him as far less significant than his own inept reading at the launch, a distraction from it if not a cause. “What’s the rest?” he was more anxious to discover.

  “The rest, sure.” Walt sounded disappointed by Dudley’s reaction. “It may be turning out for the best that we had to put off publishing your story,” he said.

  “Why should it?”

  “I need to ask you if it was based on anything in particular.”

  “My imagination. Why?”

  “You didn’t know a girl was killed in the subway where you set your story. Not just down there, on that station on that line.”

  Dudley raised his voice to fend off the crowd and the details with which Walt seemed to be fishing for him, but the only riposte he could think of was “When?”

  “Coming up to seven years ago.”

  “It won’t matter, will it, when it’s been that long?”

  “I’m afraid it will, Dudley, especially when it’s the anniversary in a few weeks.”

  Was that true? Dudley couldn’t remember. “Who says so?”

  “Her family. Seems they were never convinced her death was an accident. It was put down to her running too fast for the train, so you can imagine how they must feel.”

  Dudley almost said he couldn’t and had no interest in trying, but instead protested “Then they ought to think my story’s on their side.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, sadly. They’re very angry and upset because it looks as if you were writing about her. If you say it’s a coincidence I believe you, or do you think you may have had the real thing at the back of your mind and not realised?”

  Too late Dudley grasped that he could have used this as an excuse. By then he’d said “My story came first.”

  “Fine, I’ll tell her family. Now forgive me for asking you this, but there’s no way we could run into the same kind of problem with your other stories, obviously, is there?”

  “That’s right,” Dudley said, which wasn’t nearly vehement enough. “There isn’t, no. Of course there isn’t.”

  “As far as you know, but then you didn’t know about this one, did you? Well, I guess we’d need to have worse than bad luck to be hit by another coincidence like that. Do you have a favourite among your other stories?”

  “I like all of them. They’re all as good as that one.”

  “Maybe the best solution is you call Vincent and tell them all to him. We don’t want to keep creativity waiting.”

  Dudley lowered his voice and his head as though he meant to butt the crowd away from overhearing. “Solution to what?”

  “To which of your stories he’ll have to use now. He’ll be staying clear of the subway, and you’ll realise the magazine has to as well.”

  Dudley’s surroundings seemed to grow as flat and garish as floodlit painted cardboard. “Aren’t you going to publish my story?” he pleaded for nobody except Walt to hear.

  “You can understand our position. Controversy could help our sales, but not that kind. We don’t want to get ourselves disliked by our public.”

  “It isn’t fair. I won.” Dudley saw passers-by gazing at him with amusement or glancing away in embarrassment, all of which left him vulnerable to a sudden belated panic. “Anyway,” he objected as if this could make the situation cease to be, “how do the family know about it when you haven’t published it yet?”

  “Somebody at the launch called them about it. Either they didn’t know who or the girl’s father wasn’t telling me. I wish I knew who it was as much as you.”

  Dudley doubted it. He tried to recall the faces of his audience, but all that he could bring to mind was how they’d looked uncomfortable in entirely the wrong way, and once Patricia had taken over the reading he’d devoted his attention to her. If she hadn’t read the story, it would have been published before the girl’s family could interfere. Patricia had interfered by reading it, and his guts were beginning to tighten when Walt said “Would you rather have Valerie choose? We’d still like to try and publish you when you’ve been so understanding. Why don’t you email us all the stories when you get home. Valerie needs to select one as soon as she can.”

  Panic was closing around Dudley again. He should never have let himself be driven to claim he’d made the other stories up. He felt as if people he couldn’t locate in the crowd were watching him say desperately “I want to look at them first. I haven’t read them for a while.”

  “Do that tonight, then, and send as many as you like. Okay, let me leave you to call Vincent.”

  The babble of the crowd seemed to flood the earpiece as the heat fastened on Dudley with its claws. He was so distracted that he almost keyed Vincent’s number, but he had worse than nothing to say to him. He thrust the disloyal mobile into his pocket and forced himself to turn back to the office. He’d taken the phone outside so that Mrs Wimbourne couldn’t listen to him in the staffroom, but now he felt as if he was being dragged back to a prison she’d built for him. He strode behind the counter to her booth as her head swung towards him like the cow’s that she was. “You’ve got what you wanted,” he said with an expression that made his lips ache. “They aren’t publishing my story after all.”

  FIFTEEN

  “Oh, thank you, Patricia. They’re lovely. Quite beautiful. Thank you so much.”

  “My pleasure, and I’m on time this time as well.”

  “If anything I think you’re a little bit early, are you? No, actually you aren’t. He mustn’t be watching the clock. Dudley? Our guest is here.”

  Patricia used both hands to shut the uncooperative front door while Kathy carried the bouquet to the stairs and took hold of the blond banister as if it might help convey her voice to her son. “Dudley?” she called again, and told Patricia “He was writing, he said.”

  “Do we want to interrupt that?”

  “Even authors ought to be polite.” Kathy knocked not too hard on the banister. “It’s your friend from the magazine,” she called. “Patricia.”

  This earned a mumble from above, too curt to include a welcome. Patricia saw that Kathy wanted to pretend it did, and so she tried to leave the subject behind as she followed Dudley’s mother along the hall. “I do like your photographs,” she said.

  “Still, we’re not experts, are we? Your photographer spotted I was just an amateur. Do you mind if we eat in the kitchen? Dudley likes to be close to the fridge so his drinks are as cold as can be.”

  “It’ll be cosy,” Patricia said, though that wasn’t the word
that occurred to her. Everywhere she looked were corners—of the washing machine that steeped the room in a faint soapy smell, the tall refrigerator, the steel sink, the rectangular table. Only the pine chairs were at all rounded, and they were also straight and hard. “It is,” she felt bound to add.

  “We’ve always thought so, Dudley and I. What would you like to drink?”

  “Is wine a possibility?”

  “I can run out and get some by all means.”

  “I should have brought a bottle. The lemonade we had last time would be fine.”

  “We’ve plenty of that. It’s his favourite.” Kathy stood a bottle of it among the settings on the table and began to clip the stems of the bouquet into the pedal bin. “While he’s not here to be embarrassed, did you have time to look at my story about him?”

  “I’m hoping I may find a quote.”

  “Anything and as much as you like.” Kathy ducked lower as she said “I shouldn’t think you’d want to use all of it. Obviously you wouldn’t.”

  “I don’t think we’d have anywhere near enough space, even with the trouble with his story.”

  Kathy gave a small low cry. The stem of one of the roses in her grasp had snapped. “Which trouble?” she gasped and sucked blood off a finger. “Does he know?”

  “Shall I get you a plaster for that?”

  “There’s no need, really. I can’t even feel it.” As Kathy thrust her finger under the tap she twisted to face Patricia. “You haven’t told me what the trouble is,” she said.

  “They’re scared of my story.”

  Patricia didn’t let the closeness of Dudley’s voice unnerve her. She turned her head without haste, only to be confronted by a deserted hall. The next moment he ran down the very few stairs he hadn’t descended unheard and flashed her a grin too knowing for her taste. “What on earth could anybody be afraid of about you?” Kathy said with a stab at a laugh.

  His lips shifted, apparently in search of an expression rather than an answer, and Patricia turned to her. “Would you remember a girl who was killed on the underground?”

  “Too many people are these days, aren’t they? They don’t seem to take as much care as they should any more. I expect it’s drink or drugs or just being too used to things that are dangerous. Sit down, Dudley, and we’ll start.”

  As he took the seat opposite Patricia she said “This one was at Moorfields.”

  “That’s strange,” Kathy said once she finished ladling soup into bowls. “It’s sad, of course, but don’t they say life imitates art? Mushroom soup. Our favourite.”

  Patricia suspected that meant Dudley’s, even if he was loading it with salt and pepper from the cruet in the shape of a new moon and a star. Enough mushrooms had drowned in the greyish liquid to lend it their taste. Having enthused about it twice, Patricia asked Dudley “What made you choose that location for your story?”

  “Best place.” When she raised her eyebrows he said “Farthest from people. Nobody to hear if she screamed. Nowhere else you could be sure of getting her alone down there.”

  Did this apply to the story less than it should? Presumably he had the process of conceiving it in mind. Kathy removed the bowls, although his still contained all its mushrooms. Patricia made no comment, but he read her eyes. “Slimy,” he informed her. “I only like the taste.”

  Kathy scraped the mushrooms into the pedal bin and produced from the oven a grill tray full of lamb chops. “I hope you won’t miss the bones,” she said to Patricia. “His father used to say I was indulging him, but I could never see the point of forcing something on a child.”

  A decided silence followed except for the slaps of meat and the plumps of boiled potatoes Kathy was transferring to plates. Carrots came with muted thuds, and parsnips with a mushy thump, before she brought the plates to the table. Once Patricia had sprinkled mint sauce from a jug shaped like a fat pink cartoon tulip and been vehemently polite about her sample mouthful of it all, she felt entitled to resume her questioning. “Vincent wanted me to ask you a couple of things,” she said. “He’s trying to understand your character.”

  “Isn’t he just supposed to film what Dudley wrote? That ought to help him understand anything there is to, though I don’t see what there could be.”

  “Vincent isn’t too clear why Mr Anonymous—” When Dudley frowned at that, Patricia said “Did you come up with a name for him?”

  “No, because nobody ever knows who he is.”

  “You’re definitely writing about the same killer all the time, then.”

  “Of course I am. He’s what my stories are all about.”

  Rather than speak up for victims who didn’t exist, Patricia said “Do you know more about him than you put in the stories?”

  “Maybe.” Dudley sawed at a piece of lamb and brandished half in front of his lips until he’d finished saying “Such as what?”

  “Excuse me interrupting again, Patricia, but do eat up your vegetables as well, Dudley. I’ll bet they have vitamins to keep you creative in them.”

  He redoubled his stare at Patricia. Much less distinctly, not least because he had to wipe his lips with the back of his hand, he repeated “Such as what?”

  “I know I didn’t read the stories properly, but I couldn’t say why Mr Anonymous kills anyone.”

  Perhaps the repetition of the name annoyed him. A frown squeezed his gaze narrow as he swallowed. “Because they ask for it,” he said.

  “You’re saying that’s what your character thinks.”

  “Him, yes.” As the frown lifted it appeared to tug at his lips. “Mr Killogram,” he said, “the opposite of Kissogram.”

  “Are you calling him that for the film?”

  “Why don’t you make it the title?” Kathy said.

  “We’ll see what Vincent thinks, shall we? So Dudley, you’re saying he blames his victims somehow.”

  “He doesn’t blame them. He doesn’t care that much.”

  “He has to have a better reason than not caring.”

  “They don’t know he’s there, that’s all.”

  “That’s more how he does it than why, isn’t it?” Kathy said.

  “It’s both.” Perhaps he felt doubly interrogated, since he added with some irritation “It’s when everything goes right for him.”

  “I don’t think I understand that,” said Kathy.

  “It’s when there’s nobody about except him and whoever it’s going to be, and the place helps as well. It’s as if it’s meant to happen,” Dudley declared, then shook his head so violently that a forkful of meat on the way to be eaten smeared his lips. “Not as if. When it is.”

  However direct an insight into his character this was, it discomforted Patricia. “Maybe you’re best talking through some of your stories with Vincent,” she felt relieved to have thought of suggesting. “Have you decided which you want him to think about?”

  “Let me just—” Kathy leaned backwards to tear off a section of kitchen roll with which she dabbed Dudley’s mouth. “You’ll still be using the underground one, won’t you?”

  He snatched his head aside and glared at Patricia until she admitted “Unfortunately not when the real girl’s family would be upset.”

  “But you have to publish it at least.”

  “We won’t be using that one. I’m sure whichever we do use will help Dudley’s reputation just as much.”

  “I thought you signed a contract to publish that story.”

  Patricia hadn’t but felt nearly as accused, since her mother had. “It doesn’t actually commit the magazine to publishing it,” she said.

  “That’s a bit unbalanced, wouldn’t you say?” When Patricia failed to do so Kathy said “Besides, how do you know the family will mind? It’s only the same station, after all.”

  “They heard about the reading and they weren’t at all happy. We don’t know how they heard.”

  “Who’d want to ruin everything for him?” Kathy protested, then released a loud breath. “No, you’re rig
ht, the family should be considered. I don’t want to think what would become of me if I lost my son. Are you sure you’ve finished, Dudley? There’s lots of goodness in front of you still.”

  “I’ve had what I like,” Dudley said and thrust his knife into the vegetable mush.

  Kathy didn’t speak again until she’d cleared the table of plates. “Let’s have a bit of sweetness,” she said.

  As Kathy brought out of the oven a pie so collapsed it seemed bent on negating its own shape, Patricia couldn’t resist asking Dudley “Is this your favourite too?”

  “No, I made it because we had a guest,” Kathy said.

  Patricia did her best not to wonder what was involved in creating pastry with such a close resemblance to leather while she cut through it with just her spoon. Once she’d managed to establish that the filling consisted almost as much of honey as of apple she was able to rhapsodise about the dessert, not too belatedly, she hoped. She thought she’d failed to be convincing until Kathy said “Which story do you think he should send in instead?”

  “I don’t think I had time to judge.” Patricia couldn’t tell how much of the impression that she retained—of the same sly face peering from behind every tale—derived from the stories, how much from Dudley’s comments. “Which do you?” she said.

  “None of them will be the winner, will it?” Kathy objected before chasing away her bitterness with a smile at her son. “Except they all are. How about the one when he pretends he’s going to help her out of the sinking mud on the beach and pulls her on her face instead and stands on her? That gave me the shivers. Or is it a bit too nasty when he’ll be the hero of the film?”