Secret Story

by Ramsey Campbell

  “Not you, Dudley. I couldn’t ever be you.” Since this fell short of placating him, she said “I was agreeing with you, though, I hope you saw. It was terrible what happened to the girl from your magazine, but I couldn’t forgive her for joking like that about you. Let’s keep what I wrote between ourselves, shall we?”

  “I won’t be keeping it at all.”

  Her pang of inner agony felt sharper than the edge of the knife, which she became aware of holding and planted on the working surface with a muted clank. “I don’t care so long as it helped,” she told him.

  “Oh, it did. It showed me what I have to do to write.”

  “I’m glad, then. I know I was presumptuous. I wouldn’t have dared to be if you hadn’t seemed so desperate to write, but can I be a little bit proud of myself, do you think?”

  He made a show of waiting to be absolutely sure she’d finished before he revealed the expression he had been withholding: slack-lipped disbelief. “You can be what you like when I’m gone,” he said.

  “Gone.” The word felt so massive that she could barely dislodge it from her mouth. “Gone where?” she said more effortfully still.

  “Anywhere my writing’s safe.”

  “It is here. I promise I won’t go near it ever again unless you say.”

  “No point in promising. I don’t trust you any more,” he said and turned his back to stalk along the hall.

  “May I drop dead if I ever go in your room again without permission. May Mr Killogram come for me if I do.”

  Perhaps she oughtn’t to have made a joke, or perhaps Dudley resented her borrowing his character. He halted at the foot of the stairs, but only to establish “It doesn’t matter what you say. You promised before and then you went and did that.”

  “Not like I’m promising now. Don’t you know I couldn’t bear to lose you?”

  “Well, now you have,” he said and started upstairs.

  As Kathy ran after him the hall seemed to blacken and shrink. It might have been the inside of her head that did, since it felt walled in by loneliness—felt like being left alone for ever in the dark. “Be sensible,” she said, although she wasn’t sure to whom. “You can’t go carrying your computer about with all your stories on it. They’re delicate things, computers, and your stories are as well. Suppose you drop it or bang it and lose them?”

  “Then it’ll be your fault for driving me out of the house.”

  “I wouldn’t, Dudley. I know you’ve an imagination, but how can you imagine I’d ever do anything that would?” When he didn’t falter in his climbing she seized the banister, though only for support. “You know you have to stay really,” she said. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”

  “That’s all you know. There’s plenty of people that would want to have me.” Perhaps his protest sounded childish even to him, because he twisted to glare down at her. Then a grin began to reveal his teeth as he said “I know who’ll want me.”

  “You’re looking at her. Nobody could more.”

  “You’ve had your chance.” The grin stayed on his lips, but his eyes grew blank. “Now it’s dad’s turn,” he said.

  “You don’t honestly believe he’d let you work the way you want to.”

  Dudley’s stare hardened, but it was directed at her. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “He’ll interfere. I know I did, and you have my promise that I never will again in any way at all, but he wants to change what you write. You remember. He said.”

  “He won’t, though,” Dudley assured her or himself, and showed Kathy his back.

  “He’ll try. He’ll stop you working with all his criticism. I know him better than you do. At the very least he’ll make it harder for you to work, and just when you can least afford it.”

  “Then it’ll be your fault,” Dudley said and wrenched his mobile out of his hip pocket.

  He was going to call his father, which made Kathy so desperate she said the worst she could bring to mind. “He doesn’t like your writing.”

  Dudley swung to face her. His eyes had grown inflamed with hatred. As she stretched her hands out and hurried up the stairs in the hope of capturing some part of him, he raised the phone like a weapon. “Let’s see what we can come up with instead,” she pleaded. “Let me see what I can. I’ll do anything to make up for what I did. I’ll do anything to help you write.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  As Dudley emerged from Lime Street Station he wouldn’t have minded seeing a girl on her own. Pensioners were crowding out of the Empire Theatre, and St George’s Hall offered him nobody among its pillars on the far side of the road. Eventually the rush-hour traffic let him cross into William Brown Street, but he saw nobody alone outside the Walker Art Gallery or the library. Further down the hill a solitary figure in denim was trotting past the museum. It turned the corner at the bottom of the hill, presenting the profile of its chest to him, and even hundreds of yards away he saw it was a girl.

  She was following the route he had to take. He should never turn a situation down if it was arranging itself on his behalf. He sprinted downhill to the corner. Alongside the museum, three lanes of traffic raced towards him beneath a concrete flyover and a further one underlined by a catwalk, below which the girl was heading for a six-way intersection overlooked by John Moores University. Some of the roads bore no pedestrian crossings, and the pavements narrowed to little more than ledges. Traffic was everywhere, faster than it should be, deafening and self-absorbed. He would be invisible; how could he not take advantage of that? His footfalls weren’t audible to him as he ran after the girl and came up behind her on the meagre concrete border at the foot of a three-lane slope. His shadow was even more eager to reach for her than he was; he saw the imprints of his hands appear on her shoulders as he stretched out his arms. He hadn’t touched her when the shadows of his hands began to ride the speeding traffic and she looked over her shoulder. “Why, hello, Dudley,” she said. “Careful.”

  She was Patricia Martingale. It seemed a perfect opportunity, but would its story be worth writing? He had to think of that too now. He didn’t know what shape his mouth adopted to make her say “Don’t worry, I won’t fall.”

  She imagined he’d been hurrying to support her. A lorry taller than a house and as long as several rushed past at arm’s length, flapping her denim jacket and raising her hair. “Don’t walk in front of the traffic,” he said. That would be premature and unsatisfactory; he might even be blamed, which would be grotesquely unfair. “I wouldn’t like that,” he said.

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t either.” She faced the road as three cars raced one another through a red light, and then she ran to the opposite pavement, where she dodged around a barrier to an official crossing. By the time she gained the pavement opposite the university he’d caught up with her. “Did you go to uni?” she was prompted to ask.

  He thought she was flaunting the nickname, boasting of how casually she took her education and implying that she was superior to him. “Maybe the cleverest don’t,” he retorted.

  This silenced her, which hardly seemed enough. Between the pavement and the university, an elongated eight-storey many-windowed piebald concrete building, witnesses were loitering on a ramp. Beyond the university a grassy slope spiked with a token plantation reduced the width of the pavement until he could feel and smell the breath of the traffic. Frustration clawed at the interior of his skull. Patricia was keeping to the inside of the pavement, but it would be the work of a moment to step back a pace and grab her shoulders and fling her into the road. The uproar was crushing his thoughts, and he had to struggle to remember to save her for later. Worse still, he almost overlooked the need to show ignorance. “Which side are we meant to be on?” he yelled.

  “I can’t hear you,” Patricia shouted through the megaphone of her hands.

  “Where are we meant to be going?” Dudley practically shrieked and had to answer his own question, so harshly that his throat stung. “That must be them.”

  Where the
grassy slope ended, past a block of unoccupied houses, a lay-by began. Three police cars were parked in it, and uniformed officers were flagging vehicles down. Further along the lay-by a girl leaned against the waist-high railing above the approach road to the newer of the Mersey Tunnels. At the far end of the lay-by he saw Vincent and Mr Killogram, but he barely glanced at them. He was too disconcerted by almost recognising the girl.

  She wore a white embroidered blouse and a short flared bright blue skirt. Her legs were bare, her feet sandalled. Her glossy black hair was spread carelessly over her shoulders as it had been. Her fragile gilded spectacles displayed blank ovals in place of eyes when she turned her head as if she knew him. Of course she couldn’t, and he was able to breathe as freely as he deserved once he noticed that her face was a little too round. He stared hard at her to establish that neither of them recognised the other, and was passing a billboard that appealed for witnesses to a fatality on a date he had no need to scrutinise when Mr Killogram called to him over the relatively subdued noise of traffic. “We were wondering if you’d decided not to come.”

  Dudley joined him and Vincent before demanding “Why would we have done that?”

  “I just meant you. I didn’t realise you two were together.”

  His tone was so neutral it seemed clear that he wanted to know whether Patricia was free. It could be worse than inconvenient if anyone took her away from Dudley now. “I’m working on it,” he said. “Don’t say anything.”

  “Your secret’s safe with us,” Vincent assured him as Patricia reached them.

  “Only with you?” said Patricia.

  Mr Killogram waved a lackadaisical hand as though to gesture her away. “Just for men.”

  While Dudley appreciated his support, he could do without her taking umbrage. He stared past her at the girl who had begun to pace back and forth. “What’s she supposed to be up to?”

  “They’re reconstructing the movements of the victim,” Vincent said.

  “Who says she was a victim? It said in the paper she was on drugs and she must have fallen over the wall.”

  “Her parents always said she wasn’t drugged enough to fall,” Mr Killogram informed him. “Someone in the police must agree with them.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “Her parents say she never would have killed herself. Had no reason and wasn’t that sort of person. Maybe someone threw her over.”

  Dudley understood that he couldn’t display too much relish in front of the others, but it was frustrating to have to watch Mr Killogram taking no pleasure in his nature, even secretly. The movements the girl was performing were unsatisfactory too, since they bore no resemblance to the reality—especially not to the spasm, hardly more than a twitch at that distance, that had passed through her on the road below the lay-by in the protracted seconds before an immense lorry had driven all the wheels on its left side over her with a huge belated gasp of brakes. He’d never been sure whether the insect she’d become had retained enough consciousness to attempt to crawl out of the road. She’d seemed to have little enough when he’d approached her and asked her the time, never mind when he’d pointed out that her sandal was coming unbuckled and stooped to dart his arm behind her knees and tip her over the railing. The one regret he’d felt had been for her small delicate gold watch, a good deal more expensive than the unfeminine timepiece her understudy was wearing. He couldn’t help being distracted by that, and the girl’s mechanical disinterested behaviour was more irksome than his encounter with Patricia had been. “What does she think she looks like?” he was provoked to wonder aloud.

  “What are you saying she does?” said Patricia.

  “A prostitute.”

  “I suspect you don’t know too much about that.”

  Was she defending the girl or accusing him of inexperience? “She wouldn’t be selling herself with so many people about,” he objected. “It isn’t even dark.”

  He stopped short of saying that it had been—that a summer storm had cleared the streets, but the girl had taken refuge in a bus shelter opposite the one he’d used across the road. As he recalled the thrill of stealing up behind her across all six lanes, Vincent said “Are you getting ideas?”

  Dudley found the girl’s performance more confusing than inspiring; he’d already written about the escapade, and wasn’t about to waste time rethinking it. “How about you?” he asked Mr Killogram.

  “I’m here to learn from you.”

  “I expect if you saw her there all by herself with no cars about you’d go and speak to her. If she didn’t move away from there when she saw you coming it’d be her fault, wouldn’t it?”

  Mr Killogram grinned, presumably at that. “You think people get themselves killed and we shouldn’t blame the killers.”

  “Not this one. I wouldn’t want to speak for any others.”

  “You haven’t told me why he’d do it yet.”

  Dudley gazed at him to draw the insight out of him. When Mr Killogram only looked equally questioning, Dudley let a trace of impatience enter his voice. “Why not?”

  “He’ll pounce whenever he sees an opportunity, you mean. That’s all he cares about.”

  It wasn’t quite as simple in this instance; Dudley had needed to patrol the area for weeks after deciding that the equivalent location across the river was too close to home. “He doesn’t have to create situations usually,” he said. “They’re there for him.”

  Vincent pushed his spectacles higher and opened his mouth, then peered past Dudley instead of speaking. Dudley hadn’t turned when a female made herself heard at his back. “Excuse me, why are you waiting here?”

  What right had the actress to speak to him or Mr Killogram like that? Even Vincent and Patricia deserved better as long as they were with him. “Maybe we should be asking you,” he said and winked at Vincent. “If you’re looking for a director, here’s one to tell you how to play your scene.”

  “Dudley . . .” Vincent murmured with a slight but vigorous shake of the head.

  “That’s me. Mr Smith to strangers,” Dudley said as he swivelled to confront the uniformed policewoman who was scrutinising him.

  She couldn’t have recognised him except as the creator of Mr Killogram, which let him rid his lips of their sudden twitchy stiffness. “Whoops,” he said and took time to laugh. “I thought you were the actress.”

  She plainly didn’t know whether to be flattered. “Which actress?”

  “The one behind you that’s waiting for someone to shove her over the rail,” Dudley said and realised he should add “It looks like.”

  “She’s police too.”

  Dudley jabbed a finger at the understudy. “What’s she meant to be up to?”

  “Jogging people’s memories. Has she jogged yours?”

  If she thought that would catch him, she could have no idea who she was dealing with. “Why would she?” Dudley said. “I’ve never seen her before.”

  The policewoman’s face grew more officially stern. “I asked what you’re all doing here.”

  “Research,” said Mr Killogram.

  “For what?”

  “A film. As he said, he’s Dudley Smith, our writer. You’re going to be basing your script on real murders, aren’t you, Dudley? It’ll just be the man who commits them that’s out of your head.”

  Dudley was starting to regret Mr Killogram’s enthusiasm. “It’s not like that. The murders will be too.”

  “That’s not how I understood it. Sorry if I’m talking out of turn.”

  Had Dudley disappointed him in some way? The policewoman gave Dudley no chance to ponder. “If it’s fiction you’ve no reason to be here,” she said.

  “We want to make it as real as we can,” said Vincent.

  She treated him to an unimpressed stare that she then dared to transfer to Dudley. “How real are you kidding yourselves that can be?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “If you ever saw the real thing you wouldn’
t want to make your kind of film about it. We’ve heard about you and this film. I’m going to have to ask all of you to move on.”

  “You can’t do that. Tell us what we’ve done that’s against the law.”

  “Obstructing the police if you carry on. We need this area to pull cars over.”

  Though he was sure the policewoman had concocted the excuse to oust him, he had no reason to linger; the reconstruction had simply put the original girl back in his head. “I’m going, but only because it’s my choice to.”

  He would have liked to watch the policewoman try to make that into an offence, but Vincent was calling him. “Let’s have a word.”

  He was strolling away from the police and the mechanically pacing actress. As Dudley and the others caught up with him, the scene began to replay itself in Dudley’s mind: the girl flailing the air with her legs as she vanished over the rail, the frustrating moment as he’d straightened up too late to watch her fall, the soft flat thud that had made him expect to see her body spread wide and enormous. “I’d be working if I wasn’t here,” he protested.

  “Sorry if you feel you didn’t have to come.” Vincent reached to push his glasses high but instead gazed over them as if this might render his comments more amiable. “I’d like to start filming next week,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I’ll have enough for you by then.”

  “Let’s be honest, I’m pretty happy with my script.”

  “You need me to get it right. You said so.”

  “I wouldn’t have put it like that.” Vincent seemed in danger of forgetting how important Dudley was. “Walt’s anxious for us to get started as well,” he said. “He doesn’t want any more people trying to stop the film. Better keep the controversy for after it’s released, he says.”

  “Can’t you stand being misunderstood?”

  “You’ve given us nothing to understand yet.” Rather more gently Vincent said “Walt did point out your contract doesn’t give you a say in the film, but I’d at least like you to tag along so I can ask your advice if I need to.”

  “I’d like you there as well,” Mr Killogram said.