Incarnate

by Ramsey Campbell

  “I thought you might remember the last dream you had there—the one that was more than you could take.”

  “Well, I don’t, and I’m glad I don’t. Do you?” she said with a fierce triumphant look.

  “Parts of it, yes. I remember a back room full of people who looked, I don’t know, unfinished. I remember getting there via a red front door with a dog-faced knocker. Have you ever seen a door like that?”

  “Never, and I don’t want to.”

  “What bothers me is that I can’t remember how you got to that house.”

  “I don’t remember that either,” Joyce said, and looked furious, then tried to look careless as she hurried ahead. It took Molly a moment to realize Joyce had trapped herself, but by the time she overtook Joyce, the small woman was ready for her. “I’ve only one thing to say about Oxford,” she said, “and it’s this. They shouldn’t have put us all together like that. They locked up all that dreaming with nowhere for it to go. They overloaded us, that’s what they did. They burned out my dreaming. And I’ll tell you one more thing,” she said, grabbing a railing of the park as if she wanted to shake it at Molly, “I wouldn’t tell them, but I’m glad they did. I never want to dream again. Reality is more than enough for me.”

  They reached MTV without having exchanged another word. Tessa on the fifth floor seemed determined to get rid of Molly. “I wouldn’t be seen round here just now if I were you,” she told her as Joyce began her story. Molly couldn’t understand why she was lingering, after she’d told Joyce they ought to stay apart, but Tessa had to say, “I really think you ought to go,” before Molly could make herself do so, feeling a looming frustration so intense that it didn’t feel like hers at all.

  Of course it must be. She was frustrated by Joyce’s denial of everything she had once been. At least I can still dream, Molly told herself walking home, and I mean to use that. She already had. She stopped to gaze at the police station. What had she suddenly almost remembered? The boxy, off-white building with its gutters spiky with icicles and its buried cells looked so enigmatic it seemed meaningless. Eventually she made her way through the unsteady crowd, still wondering what she had already dreamed about the police that she had overlooked and which it was so crucial to remember.

  24

  DANNY got a gray suit for Christmas. His father shook his hand curtly and growled, “Happy Christmas”; his mother cried, “Try it on.” When he slipped his arms into the jacket he found that the breast pocket bulged. He reached in, hoping for sweets or even a radio, but the book that looked like a miniature Bible was a thesaurus. “You take that to work and read a page whenever you can and then you won’t be stuck for words,” his mother said. Danny gave her a set of pans, gave his father a book about MGM.

  It was much like previous Christmases: his mother blinked forlornly at the turkey and the charred vegetables and said, “I don’t know what went wrong”; his father clapped her on the shoulder and growled, “Nothing wrong with it at all.” He glared at Danny for saying, “I’ll bet you’re glad now I gave you pans.” After they had gnawed their portions of dried-up Christmas pudding, they played games to cheer her up, and then finally the whisky ritual, his father producing the bottle and muttering, “I suppose you want one too,” while his mother said, “Don’t give him too much,” and then his father demanded, “What are you going to do if the Hercules closes?”

  Danny choked. His nostrils felt afire with whisky. “It isn’t going to,” he managed to say finally.

  “Listen to it. Don’t you notice anything that’s going on around you? Why do you think it’s closing every afternoon?”

  He noticed all right, noticed more than anyone else; he’d just learned to keep it to himself. “Who says?”

  “Sidney Pettigrew says, that’s who. Every afternoon once the kids are back at school. Don’t tell me you didn’t take that in.”

  Had Danny forgotten he’d been told? Mr. Pettigrew hadn’t bothered telling him, more like—maybe he’d hoped there would be a scene like this. His father was shaking his head in disgust. “Look at it. The place could catch fire and he wouldn’t notice.”

  His mother had been wheezing in sympathy with Danny’s coughing, she’d heaved herself to her feet to thump him on the back, but now she had caught her breath. “They won’t really close, will they?”

  “Afternoons are the beginning of the end, you mark my words. It’s these videos that are the root of it, and people being afraid to go out at night. Soon they won’t go out at all. They’ll ring up for their shopping and have it delivered in armored cars.”

  She was sipping her milk with a festive touch of rum. “Well, I think it’s very sad.”

  “It’s more than bloody sad, it’s criminal. Give me wartime any day. People cared about each other then, and the Hercules was somewhere you were proud to work. Remember how I used to have to run to the Plaza with the newsreels as soon as we’d shown them? Nearly lost them in the blackout once. We didn’t need to advertise in the papers, just put our posters in the shops and we’d have a full house every night. After the war the rot set in,” he said, and Danny wondered if he meant that Danny had been born, if he were remembering teaching Danny to work the projector and losing his temper whenever he had to repeat himself. “Pettigrew can see the way it’s going. He’s thinking of opening a video library.”

  “Then I’ll work there,” Danny said.

  “You’ll be lucky.” His father glared at him. “You’d need to be able to talk to people.”

  “Well, leave him alone and maybe he will. You do what I said, Danny, you read that book every chance you get. Then you won’t always be having to stop and think.”

  But he needed to, to make sure he was safe. He wished they would both leave him alone. Danny closed his eyes and woke when his mother asked who wanted a snack. He was in bed when he realized he hadn’t said thank you for the suit and the thesaurus, but he couldn’t even pronounce that word; it felt like a trick played on his mouth. He wouldn’t be so easy to trick tomorrow, when he would be at the Hercules and could start to deal with Dr. Kent.

  He left home early, he was so eager to be in the projection box. Children were fighting on the steps of the Hercules, trying to pry open the display case to steal the Disney poster, writing their names on the walls. Danny chased them away just as Mr. Pettigrew unbolted the doors for him. “Never mind chasing my audience, there’s few enough of the little darlings as it is,” he said, and then saw the graffiti. “Little swines. I should never have left Bath. We showed the better class of film there for the better class of audience. Never sent the children by themselves, always came as a family. Half the families booked the same seats every time. It was like pews in church, and they had just as much respect for them.”

  Danny was wondering why he’d come here from Bath if he hadn’t had to, when the manager frowned. “Come in my office. I want a word with you.”

  There was nobody to overhear, but that was Mr. Pettigrew’s way, like always being on the steps at the end of the show to say good-night to his audience even when they told him where to go, and wearing his black jacket on the hottest summer days. Danny wanted to be alone in the projection box. As soon as he was standing in front of Mr. Pettigrew’s desk, he said, “It’s all right, my dad’s told me.”

  Mr. Pettigrew touched the tips of his moustache with finger and thumb as if to line it up with his bow tie. “Told you what?”

  “About the afternoons.” When Mr. Pettigrew still frowned, he said, “How we’re going to close.”

  “What do you mean, close?”

  “He said how you’re going to open a video place instead of here.”

  “He said that, did he? I’ll be having words with him. And is that why you went skulking off to Felicity there?”

  Danny glanced round, expecting to see whoever she was, or at least a photograph. The sight of nobody confused him even more than the question. “Where?”

  “All the gods help us, have you forgotten already? Don’t ac
t the fool with me, lad, you’re enough of one without trying. I suppose you didn’t know I knew. Well, what have you to say for yourself?”

  “I didn’t follow what you said.”

  “Sainted heavens, you get worse. They’ll be putting you away. The Royal in Chelsea, does that mean anything to you? Do you happen to recall the manageress who I’ve known for years and always comes round for a Christmas drink?”

  The syllables fell into place: Felicity Tare, Mrs. Tare, who had sounded like Miss Astaire. Danny felt prickly and desperate. “I didn’t know we were closing then,” he pleaded. “And she wouldn’t give me the job.”

  “You astound me. How could she have missed that chance?” He was gripping his own lapels so hard that sweat bloomed grayly from his fingertips on the black material. “I’ll tell you something, lad, in case it hasn’t sunk in. I’m the only one who’ll employ you, for your dad’s sake.”

  Danny had never expected to feel grateful to him. “So can I work in the video place?”

  “I’m dreaming. I’m not hearing this.” Mr. Pettigrew stood up slowly as the zombies had. “Get in your box and don’t come out until you’re told. And here’s something for you to think about: if we’re closing, I promise you’ll be the last to know.”

  Danny climbed the worn steps to the projection box. He should have known that the manageress would tell on him, for she was under Molly Wolfe’s control—even her name had been meant to bewilder him. Now Molly Wolfe was trying to get the Hercules closed while Dr. Kent kept him confused, so that Molly Wolfe could sell cassettes of herself like the one he’d seen in the booth in Soho. He knew exactly what was going on, and he meant to make sure that everyone did.

  He switched on the tape of music for the auditorium, songs that Mr. Pettigrew recorded from the radio, editing out the disc jockey and the commercials. Children were running into the auditorium, banging all the tip-up seats and stamping their feet for the film to begin. He watched the spottily luminous clock above the purple curtains, and grunted with relief when it was time for the film. As soon as Mandy brought his cup of tea he could begin.

  The first reel was over before she gave it to him, along with a dirty look. The tea was so hot he couldn’t hold the plastic cup. He put it on the ledge of his window to the auditorium, he trampled on the carpet where the magazines were hidden, then he took out his pad and sat on his high chair to write.

  It was the only way to deal with Dr. Kent and Molly Wolfe. Putting her face in the magazines was no good, not when the positions were already unsatisfyingly familiar and when afterward he felt disgusted with himself. Going back to Dr. Kent to make her think she’d got the better of him would be to trick himself, for there was no reason to go back. Publicity was what they were scared of, you could tell from the way Molly Wolfe had tried to hide her face from the newspaper—the same newspaper that people had been writing letters to about the sex shops. That paper wouldn’t let her stop it printing what he wrote.

  “Dear Sirs,” he wrote, and sucked his pen. His mouth tasted tinny by the time he began scribbling. “The people who wrote and said they didn’t want any sex shops in Soho where they live ought to be told there is somewhere a lot worse there, at 8 St. Quentin’s Court off Wardour Street, where Dr. Guilda Kent takes people she catches coming out of sex shops by saying she’ll tell people they were there.” He had to be careful now not to give away who he was; he was sure that when he’d written to the papers during all the uproar about the CIA giving people drugs, when he’d told them to look nearer home, in Oxford, they’d thrown away his letters as soon as they’d read his address on the flap. “She uses Soho as a front,” he wrote, enjoying his succinctness. “She is involved with Molly Wolfe who you reported, who you can see in the sex shops, so you can see that one of them is luring victims for the other.” That would make people have to think which was which, think for themselves for a change. “If you don’t believe me go and ask them and see them hide their faces,” he finished, and began to copy the letter out neatly while he thought of a name to call himself.

  He stopped at “involved” and took out the thesaurus,, which was dragging at his nipple as his mother said he used to do to her. “Implicated” sounded better, and he wrote that instead. He finished the copying and signed himself A. Mann, then he went to his window and saw that Mr. Pettigrew had called the police.

  Children were dodging from row to row to borrow tickets from children who’d paid to get in, while Mr. Pettigrew and Mandy and the police tried to head them off and Mickey Mouse waved a wand, trying desperately to stop the multiplying magic. Danny moved his plastic cup so as to watch the show, and it wasn’t until he heard the hiss of leaking tea that he realized the projector was melting the cup. When he tugged at the cup most of it came away, spilling tea down the projector and jerking the film off the screen, toward the dusty cut-price chandeliers.

  Mr. Pettigrew came in as soon as the police had marched away their captives. “Why don’t you set the place on fire and be done with it,” he said when he saw the base of the cup oozing down the side of the projector. Danny’s throat went dry—Mr. Pettigrew was treading on the magazines. “Off tomorrow, aren’t you? Allah be praised and bless all the nignogs. If I could pay your dad his rate I’d have him back full time.”

  Danny hardly heard, for Mr. Pettigrew had shown him that he couldn’t send the letter. If he sent it without signing his real name, then Dr. Kent and Molly Wolfe would be able to lie, because there would be nobody to stand up against them. If he signed it his mother might find out he’d been to Soho. He knew what to do, they hadn’t beaten him.

  At home he hid the letter under his bedroom carpet and was still tonguing breakfast from between his teeth to chew as he made for Soho the next morning.

  Wardour Street, was almost deserted. Perhaps Dr. Kent was taking a Christmas break. The door at the foot of the stairs was open, and it occurred to him that he might be able to look through her files. That sent him tiptoeing across the court. When he looked up the stairs she had come out of her office and was waiting for him.

  Her long face smiled as he clung to the doorway. His penis felt as if it had retreated into his crotch from cold and panic. “Happy Christmas, Danny,” she said. “Come right up.”

  If he tried to step back he would fall on his face. That must be why she was smiling, grinning like a horse. The staircase seemed so long and steep he thought he would never reach the top. She went back into her office as if she were tired of waiting, and now he could creep out while she wasn’t watching, except that he wasn’t going to turn back and leave her unchallenged. She couldn’t keep him climbing the stairs forever, though he was sure she was trying. The thought seemed to release him, for almost at once he was at the top.

  “Close the door.” She turned from the filing cabinet with a card in her hand. He stamped his feet—gray ice pattered down the stairs—and closed himself in. The glare of the frosted glass left “Know Yourself” in mirror writing on his eyes. “What brought you back to me?” she said.

  He had to tell her what she must want to hear, though it tasted like bile in his mouth. “I need your help.”

  “I’m glad you’ve come to that conclusion yourself.” But she didn’t sound altogether convinced. “What persuaded you?”

  He felt his mouth stiffen. He had no answer at all. She would know he was lying, that he hadn’t come for help but to get the better of her. When she sat forward, he would have shrunk back, except that his spine was already digging into the chair. “Were you lonely over Christmas, was that it?”

  He felt grateful, and then furious with himself for it.

  “Yes.”

  “I can see how you would be.” She was toying with his file card. “And is your manager still making you show films you don’t like?”

  “Yes,” he said, relaxing, since that was true enough.

  “They still don’t turn you on?”

  “No,” he said, more relaxed.

  “It sounds to me as if he needs
me too. What was the name of the cinema again? You told me but I’ve forgotten.”

  “No I didn’t,” Danny said at once, beginning to enjoy himself.

  “Oh, didn’t you? Well, never mind. I’m glad that sort of thing doesn’t appeal to you, Danny. Anyone who reads magazines like the ones you showed me has to be terrified of women. I’d like to get hold of their subscription list, I can tell you. It would keep a team of psychiatrists busy for years.”

  “It’s all right reading about doing it to boys though, isn’t it? All those Billy Bunter books, all the school stories where the boys get beaten. They’re still in children’s libraries, I’ve seen them. Nobody tries to have them stopped. I wrote to the papers about them once but they never put my letter in.”

  She was gazing wide-eyed at him. and he had a sudden dreadful feeling that he’d said too much. Eventually she said, “You see, you can talk. You shouldn’t be so afraid that people won’t listen.”

  She was listening to make him talk. When she’d done that eleven years ago, she had nearly destroyed him. She gazed at him over her praying hands. “Tell me something, Danny. Have you ever asked a girl to go out with you?”

  Now he knew to keep his mouth shut, but the trouble was that was an answer too. “Why not?” she said.

  “Because I don’t need to.”

  He’d meant to say he didn’t want to. He bit his tongue for playing tricks on him, bit until he heard the flesh crunch. “Not good enough.” she said. “You don’t believe it and neither do I. Why don’t you take a girl out and find out what it’s like? Are you scared your mother wouldn’t want you to?”

  He pressed his aching tongue against the roof of his mouth and managed to say, “You leave my mum alone.”

  “You know what it is, don’t you Danny? She’s scared of letting you do anything without her and that makes you scared of what might happen. You’d be free if it weren’t for her.”

  He was on his feet before he knew it, his knees shoving the desk into her. “That’s not true,” he screamed.