Incarnate

by Ramsey Campbell

  She pulled back her sleeve. “And what time does this say?”

  “Oh.” The Mickey Mouse clock had tricked him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t think it would be so far.”

  “I wonder if you realize you would have to make that journey every working day.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, but he felt trapped in the office with the small barred window; how late would he be at the Hercules this afternoon? “I’m sorry,” he said again to make sure she believed him. “I thought you would be interviewing the others.”

  Again she gave him her odd, not quite smiling look. “You’re the only applicant today.”

  He smiled at her, he couldn’t help it. He didn’t even have to compete for the job, it no longer mattered if he was late at the Hercules. “Oh, good.”

  She sat back, tugging her cuffs over her watch. “So tell me about yourself. How much experience have you had?”

  “Thirteen years.” When she didn’t react he said it again at the top of his voice; he never knew when he was speaking too low. “Thirteen years.”

  “I heard you the first time. No need to shout.” She was staring past him. “You’ve always been a projectionist, have you?”

  “Not always,” he said, in case she was testing his intelligence. “Ever since I left school.”

  “Well, I assume so.” Again the odd look. “What drew you to the job?”

  “The films. I only liked the good ones, ones like you show, I mean. Old ones.” He was hoping that would please her, but her expression didn’t change. “My dad was a projectionist, so he let me help him in the box when I left school. He got me the job.”

  “You’ve worked there ever since, have you?”

  “Yes.” He wondered whether he should say, “Except on my days off,” but she didn’t seem to care that much about words.

  “Where?”

  He should have been ready for that. He was going to get this job, it was his dream come true, but he didn’t want Mr. Pettigrew to know he had been for the interview, just in case. “How do you mean?”

  “I mean,” she said patiently, “which cinema?”

  “Just near where I live. Down Seven Sisters Road.” Surely he didn’t have to name it. But she was staring at him, less patiently. At last he mumbled “the Hercules” as indistinctly as he could.

  “The Hercules, did you say?” She was smiling and shaking her head, and he thought she was impressed until she said, “Is that still Sidney Pettigrew’s cinema?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know the name of your own manager?”

  “Yes, I do. It’s Mr. Pettigrew.” He hadn’t been cunning enough. “I don’t know what his first name is.”

  “You don’t know—” She was staring past him again. “Well,” she said slowly. “Why do you want to leave the Hercules?”

  Again he felt trapped, for he hadn’t realized she might ask. He couldn’t say he hated Mr. Pettigrew for treating him like a dog, not when Mr. Pettigrew might be a friend of hers. He couldn’t say that he wanted a job he had got for himself instead of the job Mr. Pettigrew had given him as a favor to his father because it was clear nobody else would employ him, just because he wasn’t very good at speaking. He wanted to be somebody, that was all, somebody more than the schoolboy who had never been able to speak up when the teacher had said, “Got a bone in your throat, Danny?”; more than the teenager who’d locked himself in the toilet to hide from the girls who said, “Got a bone in your trousers, Danny?”; the girls kicking the toilet door and telling him what they were going to show him, until he hadn’t dared go out when the afternoon bell rang because the girls would be waiting for him in the classroom. He couldn’t say any of this, he mustn’t get confused, mustn’t let his enemies confuse him. His trousers were hurting his crotch, his stomach felt squeezed and he was afraid he was going to fart, and suddenly he realized he didn’t know how long she had been waiting for him to answer; he couldn’t see her watch as she glanced at it. All at once he had an answer, and it came as a shout. “I don’t like the films at the Hercules.”

  “I see.”

  “Really,” he said, thinking of the trash he often had to show.

  “All right, if you say so.” She stood up and held out her hand. “Thank you for coming.”

  He jumped up and shook her hand, and held on to it when she tried to let go. “Have I got the job?”

  He couldn’t see why she looked uneasy: Mr. Pettigrew had told him at once. “I really think you must wait to hear from me,” she said.

  He couldn’t go back to the Hercules without knowing, not when he was going to be so late. “Can’t you tell me now?” he said as she pulled her hand free.

  “I think it would be unfair to the other applicants.”

  “You said I was the only one.”

  “The only one today, I said. You’re the last.” She looked a little nervous, his voice had been so loud and harsh; he could still feel it in his throat, a soreness that was growing. “Well, perhaps in your case I should make the exception,” she said. “You’ve a good secure job at the Hercules. I should hold on to it if I were you.”

  His throat felt as if he had swallowed her soap, the smell of which was choking him. “Haven’t I got the job?”

  “Yes, at the Hercules. Not here, I’m afraid.” She was stepping round the desk. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get ready for opening.”

  He turned toward the door so that she wouldn’t see his face. He ought to have told her his mother was ill, that he needed the job so that he could afford to have his mother looked after properly, but it was too late now, and anyway she wouldn’t care. When he jerked the door open her suit leaped off the hook toward him. “It’s all right, I’ll see to that,” she said, but he wasn’t trying to catch it. He wanted to trample it, grind his heels into it, but she caught it in midair. He shoved the door out of his way and strode blindly out past Chaplin and Bogart and Astaire, his eyes stinging with daylight, with the air that was sharp and bright as knives.

  King’s Road looked cheap now, full of girls with tired eyes dressed in flimsy clothes that would be worth nothing in six months. He snarled as he ran past the boutique with the Mickey Mouse clock. The car outside the antique shop wasn’t a Rolls-Royce or even silver. As he ran across Sloane Square, slithering on droppings, his armpits felt like sponges, cold and soaked.

  The man in shirt-sleeves behind the ticket window made him wait because he asked for Finsbury Road instead of Finsbury Park. “No such place, mate,” he kept saying until Danny felt as if he no longer knew where he lived. Eventually the woman behind Danny in the grumbling queue told the man what he meant, and Danny ran down to the trains.

  Ten minutes dozed by before a train came, and then he had to change at the next station, Victoria. He wouldn’t even have time to change out of his suit now. He felt as if it were squeezing him smaller, smaller. The train carried him beneath the West End, past King’s Cross and into the long darkness that came before Finsbury Park, a tunnel four stations long on the route map but full of nothing except roaring dark. He tried to understand how he could have been tricked out of his job at the Royal when he was sure he had dreamed he would succeed. Had the dream been a trick as well? Had they managed to harm his mind after all this time, when he’d fought them off for eleven years?

  He ran up the sloping tunnel at Finsbury Park and onto Seven Sisters Road. Nothing seemed familiar; half of the Greek signs on the shops didn’t even bother to explain themselves—he was surprised the numbers on the clocks weren’t foreign too. The clocks agreed on how late he was, he mustn’t go home to change, and then he realized that he must, otherwise Mr. Pettigrew would see that he’d been for an interview. He turned off Seven Sisters Road, along the concrete path.

  The flats were concrete terraces on top of terraces on top of terraces. As he panted up the stairs to the second balcony he struggled to pull out his key so fiercely that he almost tore his hip pocket. The postman had be
en to Danny’s, for his father was limping away down the hall, stuffing a letter into his pocket. “Back already, are you,” he growled without looking, and slammed the parlor door behind him.

  Danny had to lie down on his bed before he could squirm out of his trousers. He heaved the mattress up and laid the suit underneath. He peeled off his sodden shirt, and then he heard his mother’s asthmatic wheezing in the hall. She had opened the door before he could shout, and he felt as if she’d caught him playing with himself. “Are you home for lunch?” she said, covering her eyes and retreating into the hall.

  “I can’t,” he said nervously. “I’m late.”

  “Promise me you’ll have a proper meal. We’ve two ill people here, we don’t want you ill too.” Her wheezing labored away down the hall, and he was glad that at least she hadn’t asked why he had worn his suit, for he would have had to admit he had failed.

  A wind met him on the balcony, and he felt the spikes of his hair spring up. He couldn’t do anything about that now, though it made his scalp crawl. A clock chimed somewhere: half past twelve. He ran alongside the giant white arrows flattened on the tarmac of Seven Sisters Road. Everyone was trying to confuse him, the manageress at the Royal and the man in the Sloane Square ticket office, trying to make sure he couldn’t get away from where his enemies wanted him, make sure he was too anxious about his mother to be able to think. But they wouldn’t stop him thinking, that was one thing they couldn’t do to him. They must be worried now, to have made sure he didn’t get the job. They were worried because at last he was sure who their leader was.

  A giant crutch that was propping up a five-story terrace stood in the market opposite Hercules Place. Headless men were queueing in the market, or dwarfs in coats too big for them, and then he saw they were empty coats, hanging on the wire mesh. He turned his back on them and hurried up the cracked steps of the Hercules.

  He was showing zombies this week, though the poster called them zombeys. Mr. Pettigrew wouldn’t change the printers, they came too cheap. Pictures of hot dogs were peeling off the stained oven on the sweets counter in the foyer, beneath the buzzing fluorescent tubes with their blackened ends. Suddenly he understood what had been going on today, saw the pattern of events. He was smiling when the office door opened beside the sweets counter and Mr. Pettigrew saw him.

  He stared at Danny while he finished tying his bow tie. He was already dressed in his black suit with the shiny lapels, his frilly shirt, his shoes that his wife polished every morning. His clipped moustache looked like part of a uniform too, and so did his shiny black hair, combed straight back from his glistening temples. “You look pleased with yourself,” he said at last. “I hope you’ve got a damned good reason.”

  When Danny didn’t answer, he fished out his pocket watch on its chain. “What time do you call this?”

  I call it the watch you got out of lost property, Danny almost said. He shrugged to show he was sorry, tilted his head as if that might hide the smile he couldn’t quite get rid of. Eventually Mr. Pettigrew snapped the lid over the face of the watch. “If your father wasn’t ill with his leg I’d fire you now,” he said. “Go on, get in your box where you’re some use. I’m taking a pound off your wages. Maybe that’ll give you less to smile about.”

  He stood in the doorway of his office, hands on hips, while Danny climbed the seven faded stairs to the door of his box. The usherettes were snorting with mirth. “That’ll be enough,” Mr. Pettigrew said with a kind of leering indulgence. “Now his highness has arrived we can let in the queue.”

  Of course there was no queue. Danny closed the door behind him and climbed onto his high chair, then down again to switch on the single bar of the electric fire. He was grinning. He didn’t have to hide his triumph now. He glanced at the time sheet, spotty with dots where Mr.

  Pettigrew had rested his pen, and peered out through his window to check the clock above the toilets next to the screen. Whoever had altered the Mickey Mouse clock must have had their instructions. That was when his enemies had begun to try to confuse him.

  The audience was trickling in now, unemployed hooligans and pensioners who must be hoping that the heat was on. They reckoned without Mr. Pettigrew. Danny watched them for a while, enjoying the knowledge that they didn’t realize they were being watched. Then he dimmed the houselights, made the curtains open, and switched on the projector. The zombies came trudging toward the credits, all of which looked like misprints, and the hooligans began to pass a bottle back and forth. They must think nobody could see them. He grinned at them out of the dark. They were just as plain to him as the tricks of his enemies were.

  He switched off the electric fire, then he sat up to watch through the window. The projector was already hot, the extractor fan wasn’t taking out enough of the heat of the carbon arc, but Mr. Pettigrew said he couldn’t afford to have it fixed. “If you’re too hot you’ll be able to do without your fire,” he’d said. Danny watched for the zombie with the maggots in its eyes and thought about the leader of his enemies, thought that she must have realized when she’d seen him that she hadn’t managed to destroy his mind with whatever she’d made happen eleven years ago after all. That was why she was making mistakes now, ever since she’d let him see her in Wardour Street. She hadn’t been able to lose him before she’d gone into the shop to phone, and it didn’t matter that she’d managed to lose him afterward by making the streets become confusing: that simply proved she was afraid of him, to play her tricks so openly, to give away so blatantly that she was responsible for everything that had been happening to him in the last eleven years. He only wished he had been close enough to the phone to hear what she had been saying about him.

  Here came the zombie, maggots pushing out its eyes. Danny grinned as the hooligans began shouting, trying to pretend it didn’t bother them. He was surer every time he saw it that it was a real decaying corpse; they could do anything in films these days. He touched the projector and snatched his hand away, enjoying the blaze of pain. He was stronger than she was, and cleverer. He was going to enjoy making her pay for all that had been done to him. He was sure he would find her again, now that he had her worried, now that he knew her full name was Molly Wolfe.

  11

  FREDA turned for a last look at her department and could almost hear the children. Holly wreathed the security cameras above the empty aisles, fold-out Father Christmases with expanding paper bellies stood guarding the toys, and she thought of the hordes of children who would soon be overrunning the Toy Fair, children wanting this and this and this while their parents said, “We’ll see,” or, “Be good or Father Christmas won’t come.” She went back, past the toy guns she wouldn’t stock if the store directors gave her a choice, to help a teddy bear as big as a six-year-old to sit up straight, and suddenly the emptiness reminded her of Doreen. She turned quickly and made for the escalators. If she wasn’t careful she might be locked in.

  Walking down the dormant escalators seemed unreal, even though her bootheels were loud as a child’s drum. On the second floor the empty beds in their hints of bedrooms made her think of Doreen too. She stepped down away from them as Mr. Harvey shouted up, “Miss Beeching.”

  “I’m coming now.” She met him in the hosiery department, among the sauntering pairs of tights. “I’m sorry if I kept you waiting.”

  “No trouble. Nowhere to go in particular.” He was settling his trilby on his high forehead and taking his pipe out of the pocket of his fur coat. “May I give you a lift home?”

  She was fond of him—his shyness when he wasn’t being the assistant store manager, his unobtrusive praise when he was. He always looked at her as if she were no taller than she ought to be, as if he liked to look at her moist eyes and her lips, which she had the habit of pursing. But she wanted to be alone just now, to think what to do about Doreen. “I’d like to walk, thanks all the same,” she said.

  He held onto his trilby as he locked the doors behind him. He must think she was mad to walk on a night like
this, when the wind felt like an invisible blizzard, or that she must dislike him. For a moment she thought of the way Timothy had looked when she had refused to marry him. “Thank you, really,” she said. “Another time.”

  The streets of Blackpool were almost deserted. Ripples scurried across puddles, the pool of light beneath a trembling streetlamp wavered, blurring. There was nobody on the promenade. She crossed to the railing and gazed out to sea in the hope that the wind might strip her fears away like litter, leaving her able to think instead of feel.

  Dark waves smashed over the Lower Walk. The night was roaring, tugging at her headscarf and her heavy coat; her face felt gripped by frost. After a while she walked past the locked piers toward the mile of stalls and fairground. The rigging of the mast that stood in the Crazy Golf course was singing in the wind. Above her the Tower was a latticed silhouette on the churning sky. She thought it was creaking. When the wind dropped for a moment, she heard the sparks of a distant tram on the wire.

  The ice cream parlors, the Horror Crypt, and the shops that sold funny hats were all locked; corrugated covers were rolled down over the souvenir stalls. The fortunetellers’ booths were locked too. Freda hurried past on the opposite pavement, for they always made her think of the fortune-teller Doreen had taken her to, who’d told her she was trying to be fair to too many people and ought to be fair to herself—she had to decide what the rest of her life was going to be like while she had the chance. She’d told herself that could mean anything: she’d thrown away her chance and Timothy’s as well, sent him to Germany to bum alive in the sky. It was no good telling herself that he-would have died anyway, she could never be sure that he hadn’t taken some risk because she had refused him. She would always wish she had known what was going to happen before she had decided that her first loyalty was to her parents, that they’d needed her more than Timothy did.

  Awnings flapped in the locked fairground, cartoonish colors seemed to glow. She had almost been able to see the future once, eleven years ago, when she had misread the advertisement about dreaming. The so-called experts had persuaded her to stay to see if she could pick up the ability, but whatever had affected her dreams that last night in Oxford, the experience had been so dreadful that she had never dreamed again. If the store hadn’t given her sick leave, if Doreen and Harry hadn’t let her stay at their boardinghouse while she recovered, she was sure she would have gone mad.